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, [...]
We can be assured that Winston Churchill was truly a lion of history, not only because books about him run more than a thousand pages. I just finished reading The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm by William Manchester (1183 pages) and isn't it pretty good proof of Churchill's lion-ness that it took three books for the author to adequately cover Sir Winston’s eventful [...]
Ann Patchett is getting to be a favorite author around here. Commonwealth, her latest, opens at an alcohol-fueled christening party. Imagine yourself, a cop, father of the new baby, opening the door to find a colleague ready to step across your threshold, uninvited. And by the time the party’s over, he and your wife are in love. Commonwealth wastes little time on the spark that [...]
Tom Wolfe is my writer hero. And he’s been busy lately, writing The Kingdom of Speech. Our top evolutionists and linguists recently admitted that, despite what they’ve been teaching for years about how man, the only “animal” that can speak, developed the power of language, they really can’t find any evidence for their theories. Wolfe, stumbling upon this admission, couldn’t help himself. He sat down [...]
I’ll just start today by assuring you that I’m not Kristen Carson, the soccer star. You can look her up if you want, but it ain't me. I’m also not Kristen Carson, the owner of kristencarson.com. That’s some chick in Texas who owns the domain and isn’t interested in selling it, though all she’s done with it so far is save it in a drawer [...]
I guess I’ve turned into an Ann Patchett fan. We recently discussed her Bel Canto here and now we have moved on to her State of Wonder, a drama that combines medical intrigue with jungle adventure. The action starts when Marina, a doctor in the employ of a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, receives word that her colleague has died. His body is still down in the [...]
Tell me if this is how last day of your vacation goes: You gather up your toiletries and dirty laundry and stuff them into your suitcase. You buckle into your car/plane seat and watch sadly out the window as the skyscrapers/seacoast/mountain range recedes from view You regret all the shops you didn’t shop/restaurants you didn’t try/views you didn’t gaze on. You wish you could stay [...]
Sometimes the cow patties in a book are like weeds in the sidewalk cracks. It’s hard to keep a few from springing up. Best not criticize, unless your own sidewalk is weed-free. But when Carl Hiaasen wrote Star Island, I’m pretty sure he hauled along a bag of weed seeds and poured them in the sidewalk cracks on purpose. That said, he wrote a pretty [...]
I probably cook for psychological reasons. […]
I can't argue with success.Haywood Smith has published a decent-size list of books, several of which belong to her Red Hat series. So, anticipating a tale full of lively menopausal characters like the red-hatted ladies you may have spotted at your local airport, I opened Smith's Ladies of the Lake and commenced her tale of four sisters, Dahlia, Rose, Iris and Violet.The action jumped from [...]
