What shall I read? This is the question that has been circling my brain for the last few days because 2011 is winding down and I want to squeeze in some great books before the year peters out. I will finish reading Diana Athill’s short story collection and We the Animals by Justin Torres today. [...]
Posts under ‘Books’
Looking Forward to 2012
I love the start of a new year – I would even go so far as to say my favorite day of the year is January 1st. I like looking back at what I accomplished, and then planning ahead – especially when it comes to books and reading. Here are my goals, plans, and general [...]
The Puppy That Came For Christmas – Book Review
I didn’t want to be dogless ever again. Life just felt right with a dog in it. Not to have one would be all wrong. – from The Puppy That Came For Christmas – Megan Rix and her husband, Ian, were struggling to conceive a baby, when they unexpectedly connected with Helper Dogs – an [...]
The Night Circus – Book Review
Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for [...]
Jesmyn Ward on NPR
Readers to my blog will know by now that I loved Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, a book which won the 2011 National Book Award (read my review). This is not an easy book to read, but it was so incredibly written, so honest, and so powerful that I have continued to want to [...]
Maman’s Homesick Pie – Book Review
Exile is threaded into your daily life long after you have become a citizen and pledged your allegiance and can make the best brownies in the neighborhood. I was compelled to make sense of my parents’ journey from Iran to America to understand the world they inhabited. Just five years shy of my mother’s age [...]
The Hunger Games – Book Review
The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period [...]
The Devil’s Ribbon – Book Review
The two countries had been forged into one, the Act of Union, described in The Times as a “delightful marriage” but viewed by many as nothing less than a rape. Emancipation for Catholics was promised but not given, rebellions were quelled with the gun. The Unionists vaguely talked of Repeal but only by legitimate means. [...]
Paid Content and Disclosure: Survey Results
I want to thank everyone who took the time to visit the survey I set up regarding paid blog content and disclosure. If you missed it, here is the post that prompted the survey. I had hoped to get a large response because I think that would give a better idea of what is happening [...]
Mr. Popper’s Penguins – Book and Movie Review
He was a dreamer. Even when he was busiest smoothing down the paste on the wallpaper, or painting the outside of other people’s houses, he would forget what he was doing. Once he had painted three sides of a kitchen green, and the other side yellow. The housewife, instead of being angry and making him [...]
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