Louis Sachar loves the game of bridge. When he decided to write a novel about bridge-players, “My publisher, my editor, my wife and my agent all said I was crazy. ‘No one’s going to want to read a book about bridge!’ they told me on more than one occasion.” Add me to that list. I gave Sachar’s The Card Turner a good try. You would [...]
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 [...]
How do we know it’s summer around here? The cicadas start humming, and this little sign appears on the county roads. […]
Maybe you’re one of those people who gets a hangnail and it’s just a hangnail, nothing complicated. […]
It ain’t easy being a woman. It wasn’t back in the year 1979 when feminist Sonia Johnson publicly disagreed with the LDS church’s stance on ERA and, for her efforts, got excommunicated. It wasn’t in June of 2014 when Kate Kelly got excommunicated for founding Ordain Women. Both cases occurred in the leafy Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. (What is it about Virginia anyway?) [...]
Some people think I don’t like vegetables. Not true. I just don’t like them boring. Put a beautifully-arranged veggie tray on your party table and I won’t even see it. (Chocolate can be very distracting.) And I sure won’t be joining up with the green smoothie movement. But there’s something wonderful about a perfectly stir-fried pea pod or slice of onion. Which I managed to [...]
My turkey is safe in my freezer. I have bought up all the canned pumpkin and the pie shells and the Cool Whip that I need. This saves me from getting in any fights in the grocery store aisles. If I were my mom, […]
Oh, sure, of course I got out my little watermelon-sculpting knife and created this scalloped beauty, which I pridefully carried to the family picnic yesterday.Ha. No. It traveled to the picnic in an ordinary Rubbermaid bin. Though it would have been easier, I tell you, to cut that shell and each little melon ball, too, using rusty nail clippers, than it was to get this [...]
So, I went back to Do-Re-Mi, so to speak, in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels and found quite a cow-patty-laden beginning.In the first of this quadrilogy, Never Mind, poor five-year-old Patrick lives under the rule of a father that charms people only to humiliate them later. Lured in from playtime by his father's piano playing--a tune the Daddy composed especially for Patrick--he stands before [...]
