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…
We’re weeks into the new year (already!) and I have done some New Years reading (which is mostly planners). I did pick a book from my New Years best books, but I was mostly getting myself all ready for a transition into dot journaling. Please don’t just hear that and run away. I’ll review the…
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…
This afternoon I am doing a thing. I have been building up to it lately, though I might have been building up to it for years. There is a part of me, for the last several months, that has thought, “May, 2022. It’ll come soon enough.” Turns out it’s not soon enough. So this afternoon…
For the holiday season, the entire homeschool co-op read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have already reviewed this book and also a couple of the movies related to it. I also listed some more movies that are adapted from it. I imagined I would have time this year to watch all of these, but…
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…
After I posted the last blog entry (“Published!), WordPress notified me that it was the 500th blog post on The Starving Artist. Whew! So I did a little digging and found out this, as well: my first post was on October 17, 2012, “A Meandering History of The Starving Artist.” My first book review was…
Well, folks, I have been published. I have been pushing harder and harder over the Pandemic, trying to veeeery slowly re-warm up my writing career so that when I am done homeschooling (May of 2022) I will have a place to jump from. I am still extremely far from writing full-time but I am so…
I have wrapped up the mythology unit in my Freshman English co-op class with American Born Chinese. Now it’s time to review the book that I used as the cornerstone of the unit. It might surprise you, but I went with Gods and Heroes: Mythology Around the World by Korwin Briggs. Of course, this won’t…
It was October when I was at a great Southern Pines, NC bookstore called The Country Bookshop with a coupon, so my choice of Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons by Thea James (co-author of the award-winning The Book Smugglers fanzine) was not just about enjoying fantasy books nor just about me having a project…
I read the Harry Potter series almost every Halloween-time. Last year I started the series by reading and then reviewing the illustrated version. This year I am doing the same thing with the Minalima pop-up edition, just it’s taken me a couple months to get around to reviewing it. (And, in fact, I waited for…
I know most of you can empathize, but it has been a busy season. I hosted Thanksgiving for thirteen and I go all out (and then multiply what you were thinking by ten), my daughter’s birthday fell the day before this year, we are still in a pandemic, I have Christmas to make happen on…
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…
I have been reading Greek mythology lately. I have been teaching mythology to a small classroom of approximately-ninth-grade boys and I have, as a rabbit trail, plunged into book after book of Greek mythology. It was always a subject that interested me. (The truth is that just about everything in English 1 interested and still…
Ya’ll like gore? Blood? Torsos ripped in half by dripping, in-side-out monsters? Go no further than Beowulf in almost any iteration. The original epic. The 2007 movie. And this Gareth Hinds graphic novel, though it’s probably the easiest to swallow because it is cartoon-y and meant for a younger audience. Still… Beowulf is a true…
Perhaps I’m cheating. No, I’m not. I just wanted to buy a couple of the books that are on my TBR that are not already on my shelf at home. I chose some shorter ones. So sue me. Medea was up near the top, anyway, since it’s Greek mythology and that’s what we’ve been studying…
As I have said before, since I was a little girl I have been looking forward to the milestones on the journey of the writing life. This summer I encountered a milestone that I didn’t see coming. Indeed, I didn’t know it was a thing to look for. Maybe you do and that makes you…
So, I was a little confused when I picked up this book. Or, no, before that. I had put One Thing on my list for reading this year. Then when the time grew nigh, I looked the book up and bought One Thing by Gary Keller, some sort of self-help best-seller. I think I thought…
It’s not that I can’t see what others would see in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. But I’m not a teenager and I don’t live in the mid-century past. I can also understand that his writing was something fresh and special and that his insistence that it stay the way it was…
I do intend to read a translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey one day. I actually believe I already read The Odyssey in high school. But this is where I am right now. I have stumbled upon the graphic novels of Gareth Hinds in my obsession with coming up with things that my middle school…
the starving artist 