How many times did I say it over the years? I read everything except horror and romance. I guess at some point I amended it to erotica and horror, but still—I do read horror, sometimes, on very special occasions, for very special reasons. In fact, I’m about to read Children of Solitude because I heard…
“Perhaps he’ll die this time. He finds this doesn’t worry him. Maybe because he’s so cold he has a drunkard’s grip on his mind. When thoughts come, they’re translucent, free-swimming medusae.” First lines of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. And I was hooked on her voice from the very beginning.
Apparently, one of the book clubs I am a part of reads Shakespeare in August—like for the past 17 years. It’s not the club I would have expected it of, exactly, but I was excited. I am a Shakespeare fan and have been since high school. Another thing: they bring in this Renaissance Literature expert/professor…
You already know that I am obsessed with books. You might not already know that I am obsessed with food. Before this blog, I had two different food blogs, and only stopped maintaining them because I couldn’t keep all those plates spinning along with everything else. But I kept cooking and baking. It goes without…
Normally I would post this as a “First Line” and make it pretty, like a meme. But it wasn’t the first line, exactly, that I wanted to feature, here, as it is the first paragraph that is notable, as a whole. And it would not fit in a neat, little, pretty box (literally, digitally). To…
The truth is, I can’t always have a book in front of my face. Sometimes I do things like drive, and reading a physical novel while driving would be dangerous. I discourage it, for the record. So, in steps podcasts. While I am not the world’s biggest fan of audiobooks, I will listen to them…
I do not prefer the epistolary form, and I am wary about having two authors on a book cover, as well, so The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows had two knocks against it from the beginning. But I had liked the movie. So one knock for.…
I have been to three “readings” lately, at local bookstores. If you haven’t been to a reading, I suggest that you go to one and make sure to buy a book while you are there. Readings are interesting and cool and they are in danger of becoming extinct if people don’t show up, just as…
I do not recall what I was doing that led me to this list (I’m sure it had something to do with the poetry unit I was teaching my ninth-ish graders), but the list of favorite poems by famed authors excited me. I thought, I want to read through that list. (I am a real…
I recently needed to assign my students a brief bit of nonfiction in order to write a summary paper. While choosing Rachel Carson’s “The Marginal World” is a little unorthodox for this assignment, I wanted something they could both enjoy (more than other options, at least) and learn from. “The Marginal World” is an oft-forced-upon-students…
Holy Toledo! We have just finished covering short stories in my home school co-op English 1 class. This week I slid into a brief bit of short nonfiction and assigned my students March, Book 1 and Martin Luther King Jr.s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter was one of three suggestions of short nonfiction that…
While a fellow at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s annual conference earlier this year, I ended up hanging with the other parent-writer fellows and parent-writers (like in the Zooms and chats, because the conference was Pandemic-virtual). One of these people was the impressive Sarah Twombly. There was just something about her… she did give…
Happily, I will be reviewing a number of short stories and poems this year, as a function of teaching a high school English class for a home school co-op. Last year, with my son in middle school, I read several short stories but didn’t think to review them. While I really like reviewing anthologies and…
This short story is not on the list of Best Short Stories. I read it because a friend recommended it to me, since I was writing a story with a similar scope. I had presented my writing group with a rough draft of a story that takes place basically on the computer, in the space…
I admit that my book reviews have not been very even. I intend to review a whole lot of great literature over the years, but my progress has been uneven and my writing of the reviews has also been uneven. I spend more time keeping up with my kids, for example, so review more Middle…
The last four years have seen a lot of change in my life. Four years ago, my husband graduated from school and changed careers, and my last child at home went off to kindergarten. I started writing full-time and published a novel within nine months. Two years ago, we made the decision to take said-son…
Frindle, by Andrea Clements, was another one of those third grade reading lists books that I bought for the new school year. In the fall, we were attempting to read the books back and forth, one paragraph at a time, but we have since stopped that. Understandably, partnering with my “low-reading” son, we read through…
So, turns out lists of literary fiction are not that easy to find, unless you are looking for results from a particular year. That, however, is a list that I am not yet making. So I did my best. (Honestly, it’s not the easy to categorize literary fiction, anyhow. I’m pretty sure some of these…
Woah, this list took me a long time to scrape together. Please don’t make too much of it (as I have not read the vast majority of the books), but I wanted a place to start with titles that didn’t appear in my largely American- and Western European-heavy best books lists. This list is not…
“Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.” Scout Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird. I am a foodie. I am also, as you know, a writer, publisher, avid reader, and reviewer. Therefore, it is only too appropriate that I dot this literary blog every once in a…
the starving artist 