I just had a horrible experience. Okay, “horrible” is an exaggeration but “disconcerting” is not enough to describe how the event left me feeling. What was the event? Forgetting what I read last week. I am seated at my desk, reading a letter that someone has shared with me. The letter references the quote of [...]
Continue Reading →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 →What do readers owe to the translators of books? You know whom I mean, the people who take books written in languages we cannot understand and give us back those same books, now available in words we can understand. We owe thanks to the literary translators. Huge thanks. Through meticulous and exacting work, carried out [...]
Continue Reading →I was on vacation last week and as usual for a beach vacation, I read a lot. Two mysteries, two novels, one epistolary volume, and one non-fiction, all so very different one from the other, and all good. I started the week with Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. A seventy-year old woman decides it is [...]
Continue Reading →Of the books published in 2011 which I read this year, my favorites are (in alphabetical order): Now You See Me by S.J. Bolton Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obrecht Ghost Light [...]
Continue Reading →I know it’s a bit late in the day to be offering my best gift idea for the mystery lover in your life but my life has been so hectic lately that I only JUST finished Twelve Drummers Drumming by C.C. Benison (I’ll admit I wasted time reading Mary Daheim’s The Alpine Winter which is [...]
Continue Reading →Every year in Britain around this time, the battle for Christmas-song-of-the-year rages. For some of us here in the United States, the battle is familiar only through the hilarious song “Christmas is All Around” promoted by an aging alcoholic rock star (played by Bill Nighy) in the movie Love Actually. The song that is sure [...]
Continue Reading →The final line of John Banville’s review of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights in the New York Times Book Review states: “the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” I have found in my lifetime of reading the [...]
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 →The meaning of life: it is a question we ponder throughout our lives, and starting from an early age. Often it is the death of a loved one (human or pet) that starts a child wondering what it’s all about, this living versus dying thing. When I was young my father counseled me, “Do not [...]
Continue Reading →
