I have read the short stories of Chimamanda Adichie and they are beautiful, transformative and inspirational (see below). And now, through this amazing TED video, I have heard her speak about the importance of telling many stories in order to understand our shared humanity across the world and even, possibly, to regain paradise. On [...]
Continue Reading →Happy December, everyone! I will be posting short reviews of fun holiday reading over the next few weeks, starting with Comfort and Joy by India Knight, and continuing on with A Christmas Homecoming by Anne Perry; The Alpine Winter by Mary Dahem; I am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley; and Twelve Drummers Drumming by [...]
Continue Reading →On Halloween, I saved the tricks for my kids and sent out treats of one hundred paperback and hardcover books to three different APO and FPO addresses, here and abroad. Who needs — and deserves — the comfort, escape, and pleasure of books more than our United States troops? Operation Paperback, founded in 1999, understands [...]
Continue Reading →I have three cats and would have five more if my husband Jack could stand the drifting clouds of hair, the scratched furniture, the meowing, and the brawling. A dog he would not even consider, with its extra requirements of walking, drool wiping, and accident clean-ups (what he doesn’t know about the cats won’t hurt [...]
Continue Reading →I hope to meet many Midwestern Book Lovers on my swing through the Chicago Area. I’ll be in Evanston reading from Tolstoy and the Purple Chair and answering questions on Thursday, July 14th, at Evanston Public Library; Mundelein on the 15th at midday at The Fremont Public Library; Chicago on the evening of the 15th [...]
Continue Reading →I put this video together with old photos, some new photos, and stacks and stacks of the books I read during my year of reading a book a day. Then I asked my youngest son to provide the music and voilà! Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: Joy Tweet
Continue Reading →Pop-up bookstores are an international phenomenon, from New York to Chicago to Honolulu to London to Berlin – and now one has come to Pittsburgh and it’s the biggest one ever. Twenty-four thousand square feet of vacant space has been turned into a temporary bookstore – exactly where a Borders used to be. For one [...]
Continue Reading →In thinking about my favorite mothers presented in books I’ve read, I realized that many of my beloved books have no mother in them at all — Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Great Expectations by Dickens — or a very sad, downtrodden mother — Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy [...]
Continue Reading →One of my first memories is of being read to by my mother. She read to all three of us girls through childhood, separately and together. She encouraged us to read on our own by making sure we always had books around us. We went to the library on Saturday mornings and the bookmobile whenever [...]
Continue Reading →Next week I am scheduled to give a talk about my year of reading a book a day and my own upcoming book, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. Although not exactly the kick-off to my magical book tour (Tolstoy and the Purple Chair doesn’t come out until June 7), and certainly not the first time [...]
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