I walked in on my daughters having a giggly phone conversation, and they immediately clammed up (except for the giggles). It’s nice that they’ve grown into adults that like each other. Just wish I could have gotten on whatever it was that was so interesting. I left, and nursed my wounded feelings by playing with the cat. As I scratched her furry little ears, [...]
I'm up for Tater Tots just about anytime. They give you that French-fry grease and salt without a trip to McDonalds. Also, you don't have to spatter up your kitchen with hot oil. My mother must have liked them, too, because she served Tater Tots on extremely special Friday nights. When I suggested she [...]
I failed to see the signs of what I was getting into. The story started out with two Smith College girls, headed up to Dartmouth for a weekend. The narrator was bookish and quiet, her lifelong friend the kind of girl who’s working her way through the world’s gin and men. Up at Dartmouth, the girls watch a football game, particularly two players so impossibly [...]
Just curious: I know you love books. But which do you love best? Book-books? The kind with the spine that breaks if you keep your place by resting it upside down? The kind where you get to turn the pages? Or e-books? The kind where you can read in bed without your flashlight? The kind where you can take whole libraries on your trip [...]
I'm sure none of us know what all lurks in our genes, although when we take a look at the children we spawn, we get a pretty good idea. For one Baltimore woman back in 1951, it was a virulent form of cancer. Henrietta Lacks felt something hard like a marble growing near her cervix. Rebecca Skloot writes, in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, [...]
Elissa Schappell wrote a collection of short stories, Blueprints for Building Better Girls. I did not like it. It commenced with a story of two teens having sex, blow-by-blow detail. In the following stories I met characters that I tried to like, but couldn’t. Here it is, the month of June, my favorite. It’s finally warm enough to sit on the deck and read. I’d [...]
Some books you love right away. This one opens with a weekend on an English estate. I meet an ingenue that I’ll call “Jillian.” She eagerly awaits the arrival of her college brother, “Henry.” And his friend, “Garrard.” (Picture hearts floating in the air here.) Not only am I enchanted by Jillian, but by the way the author weaves emotion into every line of dialogue. [...]
At the request of a faithful reader, today I unveil my top-10 fiction list. And what does it take to make the list? A) The book has to be memorable. I read enough books that they almost whiz by like highway signs. Not all of them stick with me. Ah, but the ones that do, they’re like great road trips that I wish I could [...]
First off today, I made a guest appearance on this blog. ====================================== Now, back to our normal programming. Long ago, Nick Nolte starred in the movie Cannery Row. I never saw the movie. I just assumed that, with Nolte starring, it would be about a sad young drunk in a sad part of town. When I opened the by John Steinbeck, I braced myself for [...]
You might be one of the adoring fans of the 2004 BBC miniseries, North & South, the story of the Hale family, as they move themselves from the pastoral south of England to the grimy, industrial north.The television production is adapted from the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. In case you’ve missed both the book and the TV show, let me catch you up on things: [...]
