I'm currently reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It's fiction, and yet it's not. No writer can set down a word without the business of life passing before his eyes, stirring up thoughts, emotions, memories, conundrums. It's a book for our time. I would rather it were not so, but I would also rather eat my fill of Thin Mints. The passage quoted below [...]
I took on one of literature’s heavyweights: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Why did I do it? Well, I’m a Jordan Peterson fan. And I’m a book list fan. And it's on Peterson’s list, meaning it contains great pearls of human wisdom. My copy promised that the translators achieved “the musical whole of Dostoyevsky’s original” and, if that doesn’t sound promising, I don’t know [...]
We interrupt our normal fun of reading books and cooking delicious food, to talk of serious matters, matters which, if not addressed, will make it harder to enjoy our fun. Let’s begin. Please go ahead and ask me how I feel about vaccine passports. Or maybe you know me well enough by now to guess that my answer is, “No! No way! Bad idea! [...]
In Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov paces in his Soviet prison cell awaiting his “liquidation.” As he habitually wiped his pince-nez clean, I read with a restlessness that most likely blocked me from picking up the more intricate plot points. Why do you sit here with a book? Why don’t you do something to push back our own Darkness at [...]
Here’s a book series that might float your boat: H.B. Moore’s Out of Jerusalem. It takes Nephi from your assigned-daily-scripture-reading pile and places him on your fun-time-reading pile. I tried the first volume, Of Goodly Parents. Moore’s thorough research makes Nephi and his scripture family come alive. We see him sweating on an ordinary workday in the vineyards. “His hands and feet were stained [...]
This week, we turn our attention to Stuffocation, in which author James Wallman calls out to the reader buried under too many possessions. Wallman wrote what amounts to an excellent magazine article. But if one repeats one’s useful ideas enough times, one can stretch an idea up to book-length and take up your entire week. In fact, the reading experience resembled a cab ride [...]
Let’s hear it for light reading! Escape the suspense of your own life with a girl detective novel, specifically Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham. My apologies to fans of the Veronica Mars TV series. I missed that show. If you already know her backstory, or if the series wrote it differently than the book, you may skip this paragraph. But [...]
This Strawberry Cream Dessert dirtied a lot of bowls. However, I made it with the help of grandchildren, who not demonstrated great graham-cracker-smashing skills, but excellent bowl- and spatula-licking skills. We also fed some to a fellow whose only solid food so far has been strained carrots. It may be hard to go back to the carrots.
Just curious: Would you rather be stuck at home now, wondering if your supply of Clorox wipes will last? Or would you rather have lived through the Johnstown Flood? You can compare notes on your hardship and theirs in Kathleen George’s novel, Johnstown Girls. Set in 1989, the flood-prone town (it’s had a few) prepares to commemorate the centennial of The Big One. A [...]
I spent a week reading the tale of Tessa, the thirty-something travel agent, who was perfectly fine never searching for her adoptive mother until a handsome cowboy lawyer walks into her travel agency one day and announces that her bio mother is looking for her. If that sounds like a romance novel, yes, it is. Wedding Pearls by Carolyn Brown features lovely Tessa, the [...]
