Welcome to the blog’s new home! Some people build brick-and-mortar dream homes with the game-room basements and the just-right kitchens. I’m pretty sure I’ll never get around to that kind of thing. So I’m going to call this site my custom home. At least it’s better than the house author Amy Dickinson purchased in her memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville. […]
Can't say I've been reading books too much this week, but I sure have been staring at them lately. I stared at this one:and this one: and this one:I've never had to make decisions like this before.In the last year, you probably have fifteen friends that have published a book. Well, count me in as number sixteen because, sometime in the next few weeks, Bye-Bye Nesquik [...]
My sister called my attention to this blog post:http://segullah.org/book-review/you-dont-have-to-finish-that-book/It's as if she can see me struggling with Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables. Kellie, the blogger, says "reading books that make you yawn is a painful delay on the way to that something beautiful being held in your hands."Ha! I'm not even yawning over Hawthorne. I'm just not picking it up very often. I have things [...]
Aaaaand, we are snowbound again, at least so far as church is concerned. The bishop also postponed Fast Sunday. What a wise move. Who wants to starve without meetings to distract you? Who wants to be housebound with famished children and a grouchy spouse? Then again, I can't imagine his wife being grouchy. But me? I don't take hunger well. And as soon as I read [...]
When I opened up this week's book, my reading experience was, um, enhanced by these sticky notes:Photo deletedI find one. I read a few more pages. I find another. The handwriting seems young, possibly the same age as the book's heroine. As I've admitted before on this blog, there are a few books in which I could've used these kinds of notes, telling me "laugh [...]
Maybe I lack the legal-eagle mind, but Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent has not gripped me like a good book should, which is to say, like velcro on pantyhose.I'll probably finish it though. The courtroom jargon that lies ahead should be more tolerable than the grating part that I just waded through.Which was a character named Carolyn. Actually, she's not around anymore. Somebody murdered her before [...]
The first thing I saw on the SMU campus was the fountain, a golden ring of water and light in the night air. The next morning, it was the buildings, topped with domes, borne up by columns. They were so different than BYU's, less boxy, more like something plucked off the shores of the Potomac River and transplanted to the gummy clay soil of Texas.The [...]
And . . . I still haven't finished the Lusseyran book.Maybe it's because I spend too much time on Mormon blogs. Right now, the hot topic is ordaining women to the priesthood. It springs from an interview President Hinckley did with Mike Wallace years ago, in which he explained that Mormon women are happy. They have plenty of leadership and service opportunities. They aren't agitating [...]
All righty, then. I've made it through the major Europe homework books, the big tomes, the 900- and 600-page, too-big-to-read-in-the-bathtub books. I can tell you about the good tidbits, and warn you about the slow-going parts. First up, Austerity Britain by David Kynaston, describes England just after WWII. I never understood just how bombed out they were. The nation had a terrible housing shortage. So [...]
It takes a darn long time to finish a 900-page novel that purports to cover the entire history of England. But I'm within 40 pages of shutting Sarum forever and moving on to the other one I couldn't finish, Austerity Britain. (Not because it it isn't good. It's just finding the time to tackle a 600-page book. And not fall asleep while I read.) (Not [...]
