Halfway through The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, I was already confident that I was going to like it enough to recommend it. I trusted the voice and was so impressed that even if the ending was not satisfactory, there was still much to praise. I put it on my best reads of February blog,…
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline arced brilliantly over the book world when it was published in 2010, not long after Cline’s first screenplay, Fanboys, went to screen. Ready Player One was full of fresh and exciting concepts, was as close to home as sci-fi gets, and was saturated with geeky references to 1980s pop…
It seems like just a second ago that I received the email congratulating me on a parent-writer fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing’s annual conference. I don’t say this just to brag. Along with the email were some very nice words about my writing. Along with the nice words was a comparison…
I already like Beverly Cleary, but I wasn’t sure about this book because it seems so outside of what Cleary usually writes (Ramona, Henry Huggins, cute stories about animals). Published in and taking place about in 1983, it’s a more modern book than her typical fifties neighborhood kids. It features a more “modern” family and…
My husband wanted me to read this. And since I have long joked that once I recommend something to him it’ll never get read… well… somehow that meant I had to read what he recommended. I doubt that drive comes from a healthy place. Even so, my husband, who knows and loves me, thought that…
You are about to be introduced to my favorite cookbook author. It is not Bobby Flay. It is not Nigella Lawson, or Julia Child, or Deborah Madison, though I love them all. It is none other than the lately underappreciated Bert Greene. He, my friend, was a real cookbook author. He was born into creativity…
the starving artist 