If we lined up all the books you read before you were seventeen, would you have the stomach to read any of them again? Would they even feel like the same books? I’m trying to imagine the fascination in which I would hold a book like Where the Heart Is, had I read it back in my weepy-teen days. Let me just confess that [...]
In this week’s book, The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh, Mom dies, right out of the gate. The family lives in an old house in a wide-spot-in-the-road kind of town in West Virginia. Drafty as this old house is, they sometimes turn on the gas oven just to keep warm. So, did Mom die accidentally because she sat in a closed-up kitchen, breathing poisonous [...]
When two people fall in love and get married, it’s basically the birth of a nation. That’s why you invite all the relatives you don’t know well and don’t care much about; nation birthings are a big deal, worth witnessing. And yet the young couple has no clue what they have just set in motion. To them, it’s just a handsome boy, a beautiful [...]
Go ahead, name me the small pleasure that gets you through a deadly-dull afternoon. Is it a chocolate bar? A certain Pandora station? Feeling your favorite jade earrings swinging from your ears? A stop at the gas station, where you know exactly where the pink snowballs sit on the shelf and it wouldn’t hurt to buy just one this afternoon? What if your fortunes [...]
First, an announcement: Recipes will no longer be a regular feature on the blog. Expect occasional appearances of great food, but mostly, we're going to talk about books. Thanks for checking in here. I love my readers. ========================================== “How would you like to live in Chicago?” my husband said one day. “Hmmm,” I said, as visions of adventure and skyscrapers paraded through my head. We’ve [...]
You could call this week’s book “opposition research.” I don’t like the author or his politics, but the remarkable thing about Ezekiel Emanuel as portrayed in his book, The Brothers Emanuel, is the sheer weight of accomplishment between all these brothers. How many families do you know in whom every member has risen to the top of their profession? Ari is a high-powered Hollywood agent. Rahm is [...]
Unless you’ve been living some kind of Outlander existence for the last 50 years, you might have caught on that Mormons are big on families. Traditional ones. One mom. One dad. Some children. Some people — inside the church, actually — wish we’d shut up about it. We won’t. We don’t think we can afford to. While speaking up may be our strength, I don’t [...]
I’m reading a door-stopper of a book that’s taking me two weeks. But don’t worry, I still have reading ideas for you. Here’s a post about developing a canon of Mormon literature. It’s intended for scholars and critics — “Mormon literary critics need something to criticize” — but includes a list of ten Mormon-themed books. Ten for one! Just like a big sale week at your [...]
I gave this talk in my ward on July 24, 2016. I also gave it in a former ward, um, a few years ago. Several people have requested copies. It's easiest for me to just post it here: If You're a Scrub Pine, Be a Good Scrub Pine I’m going to explain how to grow a forest. Let’s start with a rock. [...]
This week we return to the era of beehive hairdos and shirt-waist dresses as we take a look at the Astronaut Wives’ Club by Lily Koppel. Not all of us get to have a space cowboy for a husband, but whatever ways your own husband vexes you, I can offer three solutions right along with this book. They are: […]
