The Names of Things by John Colman Wood is one of the best books I’ve read this year. A great work of quiet beauty, The Names of Things is a meditative examination of sorrow and self-understanding that inspired my own meditations into how I define the circumstances of my life, and the people whom I [...]
Continue Reading →1. Find a pen or pencil, paper, envelope, and stamp. 2. Locate a smooth surface in a quiet zone. 3. Choose a recipient with whom you have a connection, through blood or love, through school or work, through shared likes and dislikes; or someone whose opinion your like/abhor, and with whom you wish to share [...]
Continue Reading →Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat made me queasy and uneasy, pitching me off the defining center line of my most heart-held certainties: that we are born inherently decent, caring, and altruistic. But then I realized her narrator, who was causing me this internal spiritual vertigo, was a functioning psychopath — and that the novel itself is [...]
Continue Reading →Four recently released mysteries helped me get through a bad bout of flu. Almost fully recovered by now, I am strong enough to sit at the computer and pound out my recommendations for all three, each one entirely different from the other and all sure to satisfy your desire for a good read. Dorchester Terrace [...]
Continue Reading →I loved Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel The Snow Child and admit to returning it late to the library because I wanted — no, needed — to reread certain soaring sections. Ivey’s writing is beautiful and her plot, a magical mix of hardscrabble survival and fantastical desires, along with her full-bodied and fully engaging characters, makes [...]
Continue Reading →I just had a horrible experience. Okay, “horrible” is an exaggeration but “disconcerting” is not enough to describe how the event left me feeling. What was the event? Forgetting what I read last week. I am seated at my desk, reading a letter that someone has shared with me. The letter references the quote of [...]
Continue Reading →I have read the short stories of Chimamanda Adichie and they are beautiful, transformative and inspirational (see below). And now, through this amazing TED video, I have heard her speak about the importance of telling many stories in order to understand our shared humanity across the world and even, possibly, to regain paradise. On [...]
Continue Reading →What do readers owe to the translators of books? You know whom I mean, the people who take books written in languages we cannot understand and give us back those same books, now available in words we can understand. We owe thanks to the literary translators. Huge thanks. Through meticulous and exacting work, carried out [...]
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