Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, by Celia Blue Johnson is explained by its subtitle: “Stories of Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature”. Blue Johnson takes us into the years, weeks, or moments before a great writer put pen to paper and explains how characters, plots, and backgrounds come from personal experiences — everything from being in [...]
Continue Reading →I’m not sure economic principles can help smooth out the bumpy patches of marriage but we all need reminding from time to time — in all of our relationships, whether between spouses or friends or child and parent — of the basic rules of togetherness. I for one will try to remember the rule illustrated [...]
Continue Reading →In the first pages of Stanley Fish’s new book, How To Write A Sentence (with the clever subtitle, And How To Read One), Fish admits that “I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away…” Like Fish, I am a sucker for a beautiful turn of words, a devoted recorder of spot-on phrases, [...]
Continue Reading →Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions. But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as Eastern as could be when he arrived in San Francisco as a [...]
Continue Reading →The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is an exquisite meditation on the restorative connection between nature and humans. Bailey, isolated and immobile due to a debilitating illness, finds herself in the company of a woodland snail. The snail becomes both her mirror and her mentor. By observing the snail through [...]
Continue Reading →The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in their interests and witty, smart, and [...]
Continue Reading →Shirley Hazzard writes in her introduction to Ancient Shore, a collection of her essays written from and about Naples, that “I wake these mornings in Naples ….realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that….I — like Goethe, like Byron — am living in Italy.” I was looking forward to feeling some of that same surprise, gratitude and awe [...]
Continue Reading →Letter to a Christian Nation is Sam Harris’ follow-up to The End of Faith. It is a provoking plea for all religions to take their place within the pantheon of “myths” and to stand down as political, social, and “scientific” forces in the world. It is time, argues Harris, to stop “cherry-picking the Bible…to justify…every [...]
Continue Reading →One-third into Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, I was not happy. The advice for aspiring writers that she offers in those first chapters (subtitle of the book isSome Instructions on Writing and Life) seems simplistic and obvious (maybe I’ve just heard it or read it all too many times before) and too cute. And what [...]
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