I wasn't sure family members would go for this dessert. But, said my daughter, "You had me at 'bread pudding.'" Bread Pudding Pear Pie smelled wonderful coming out of the oven. Kinda wish a subsequent batch of French toast smelled that good. We'll just make this one a photo essay.
Today’s book starts with a murder in a small Illinois town. The narrator is young, too young to understand the shock and scandal whirling through little Lincoln, Illinois. He’s got pain of his own. His mother died of the Spanish flu and he lives with his brother and his mourning father as though they “had inadvertently walked through a door that [they]shouldn’t have gone [...]
I used to read Mormon blogs. It was my favorite way to avoid work every day. Mind you, I’m not talking about the mommy blogs, where they offered recipes and kids’ activities. I read the brainy-people-complain blogs, where they admitted that motherhood is hard and aggressive missionary tactics are embarrassing and 35 minutes of Sunday School feels like 135. Vigorous, bracing discussion it was. [...]
Once this quarantine thing ends and I can cross state lines without my license plates attracting the wrong kind of attention, I may just break out for the scenes described in Holly Robinson’s Chance Harbor. It could take me a few days to get there. It's a marathon drive even for Robinson’s characters -- from their Boston abodes to their house by the sea [...]
They Say in Harlan County by Alessandro Portelli is not, understandably, every reader’s cup of tea (or jar of moonshine, given the subject). It’s an oral history gathered in perhaps the most quintessential Appalachian county there ever was. Since I’ve got a soft spot for Appalachia — nope, I’m not ashamed of my Kentucky grandfather — I read this kind of stuff. What is [...]
As if any of us need extra disasters, challenges or roadblocks right now, here they come anyway. At our house, it was the oven. My husband, cradling a raw chicken in his hands, hit the pre-heat button and heard something go POP! And the oven died. He is the handyman type, also the web-savvy type. If things break, he tracks down the hoses and [...]
Having introduced you to author Muriel Spark here and here, today we revisit with a look at her novella, The Girls of Slender Means. The scene is the May of Teck Club, a boardinghouse for young single women trying their luck in London. Life at the Club includes a dinner hour, meetings about rules and, occasionally, a guest speaker. As the title suggests, nobody [...]
Andrea Avery started piano lessons while still a little girl. Wonderful things happened right away. Her fingers raced over the keys. Her brain understood the tricks to be performed. Her heart fell hard for Mozart and then Schubert. The trouble came on all the nights, all the mornings, when Avery woke up stiff, swollen, overheated. Her mother, a nurse, took copious notes of every [...]
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 [...]
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Island People: The Caribbean and the World is not a book about your cruise-ship islands. Expect a reporter’s observant eye, trained on these mini-cultures formed by sugar and slavery. He includes the history, with scenes of Columbus sailing up to these islands. He also covers the foal-like stumbles of tiny nations trying to run themselves after breaking free of their colonial overlords. [...]
