Journaling for a New Year

I have boarded the dot/bullet journaling train. Let me explain. First, there is some argument about whether or not it is called dot journaling or bullet journaling and about whether or not those are the same thing. From what I can tell, they can be used interchangeably to refer to journaling in a blank book…

Christmas Book Reviews

Let’s just wrap up this year (which ended a few days ago, now) with a triple-review of Christmas-related reading. (For my original list of Christmas recommended reading—from which I pulled these titles for this year—click HERE.) And off we go… THE GREATEST GIFT The Greatest Gift is the story on which the movie It’s a…

Book Review: The Nest

Before I get to the Christmas reviews (and try to bang them out this week before we get to the new year), I have a book that I read for Thanksgiving. Yes, Thanksgiving does have some books. Well, sorta. Certainly there is not a huge amount of them (like Thanksgiving movies and let’s not even…

Easter Is a Time for Reading, Too

If you’ve been around for more then a couple weeks here on The Starving Artist, you know that I love reading lists, especially thematic ones. I have lists for most of the major American holidays, at this point, but not Easter. That’s all about to change. Though, to be honest, this list isn’t that great.…

Best Books: New Years

Oh how I do love thematic reading. Christmastime, love to read something Christmassy. Halloween. Valentines. Even Thanksgiving. In the spring I always think Anne of Green Gables, and in the fall, Harry Potter. I have been getting in the habit of yanking at least one book from my holiday lists as I arch ‘round the…

Media in Review: December 2020

BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY (2001) Kicked off the Christmas season with my teen daughter’s first viewing of Bridget Jones’ Diary. It’s possible it’ll be her last, but maybe—while she’s still under my roof anyways—she’ll join me come Christmastime and I won’t have to watch “all by myself.” I believe she said it was “cute.” It is…

Start Your Own Book Club

Is there something that you want to read this year? With all this pandemic nonsense (it’s not actually nonsense, I’m just over it in like August and am referring breezily to something that has been very real and terrible for me lately), I am—like many people—really staring off at the horizon of 2021. Of course,…

Book Review: A Christmas Memory

When I finally—after years of meaning to read it—ordered Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory from eBay, I did not expect what I got. Full disclosure: I have not read Capote, ever. I have meant to, of course, but have never gotten around to it. Yet. My impression, however, is true crime with a literary swagger.…

Holidays Change

When I was nineteen, I studied abroad in Israel. I took an Egyptian history class which culminated with a ten-day trip across the Sinai and down the Nile. On Thanksgiving, 1998, I had just been to the Museum of Antiquities and a few friends—a smattering of students from across the U.S.—were crossing the most dangerous…

A Very Pandemic Christmas

Well, we’re working our way around the calendar. We’ve now had Easter ham nuggets at our own, quiet Easter tables surrounded by homemade sanitizer and either a mountain of or a lack of toilet paper, birthdays consisting of only people in our “bubbles,” masked and in open parks despite the weather, Halloween picking sanitized bags…

Book Review: Greenglass House

Another week, another middle grades book under the bridge. It is true: I seem to read almost nothing but middle grades book these days. You’re just going to have to take my word for it that I have much wider interests in literature than middle grades books. However, between curriculum-writing for seventh and eighth grade…