Faith in Ready Player One? Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a fun romp through 80s nostalgia and a quest story for lovers of video games, pop music and movies. I’ve read it twice and seen the movie version too— I liked the book better than the movie. It’s not what I’d call a […]
Archive | books
The Lost Words: A Spell Book
The Lost Words: A Spell Book by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. The premise of this book is intriguing. Someone noticed that 40 nature words– like fern and heather and kingfisher–were dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of tech words like blog and voicemail. And so a book was born, a book […]
Best Books of 2018
I finished 44 books this year and I started or made some progress on many more that I never finished. That’s not counting any of the books I read aloud to the kids, though I certainly thought about them and they do form a large part of my reading life these days. But I put […]
Reading Mysteries
During my current re-read of Gaudy Night I started to think about the mystery genre in general and myself as a reader of mysteries in particular. I’ve read a lot of mystery novels in my life. I like the genre. Or at least I like a lot of mystery novelists: I’ve read Dorothy Sayers and […]
Gaudy Night
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers My friend Nicole, who had never read any Sayers and to whom I had recommended Gaudy Night, noticed that the Kindle version was on sale for just $1.99. So I snapped it up and then having it right there and having a friend who started sharing quotes on Facebook was […]
Reading notes November 2018
Finished in November 1. By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson Set a generation after The King’s Achievement, during the later part of Elizabeth’s reign. There are minor characters who were in the previous work and it’s interesting to see them from that perspective. I read this book some years ago, but had not previously […]
My new favorite poet: A.E. Stallings
A.E. Stallings. I kept stumbling upon her poems online (mostly thanks to my friend the poet Sally Thomas who is perhaps Stallings’ biggest booster). Every one I have found and picked up like a treasure. This. . . this. . . this . . . this. . . Gradually I came to recognize her name, […]
Susan in Exile?
An interesting brief article came to my notice this week about the figure or “archetype” of the “Susan” in juvenile fiction– The Susan: Story of an Archetype, and Why We Need Her by Alice Nuttall. It’s sparked a brilliant conversation online and I’m brimming over with thoughts that want to organize themselves into something more […]
Chronological Snobbery about the Middle Ages
We’ve been reading Men, Microscopes and Living Things, which is a sort of history of biology for children. On the whole I really like the book. It’s well written and engaging. But the chapters on medieval herbalists and medieval bestiaries both raised my eyebrows a bit and sparked some interesting discussions as I questioned […]
Reading Notes October 2018
Finished in October 1. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson I originally read this book ages ago. Maybe when I was in high school or college? I don’t think I liked it very much. So for years whenever anyone recommends it or it comes up in conversation I’ve remembered that I didn’t like it but thought: […]