I love Anita Shreve. She writes the way I want to write: with simple language but poignant description, themes of family and relationships, and a tug-at-your-heartstrings quality. Rescue, the most recent of her books, had all of these things, and yet I found something lacking. The story follows Peter Webster, known only as Webster, from his […]
Books
Catching Mistakes
I’m pretty sure it’s the “English teacher’s daughter” in me, but I love catching errors in books. Not grammatical errors, but plot errors- little things like a mistaken order of events, recounted; the wrong character labeled with the wrong action or characteristic; or the re-description of a room with something in the wrong place. It’s […]
The Hunger Games
Since this weekend has been all about the hype surrounding The Hunger Games premiere, I thought I’d re-post my original assessment of the series, posted back in September. I still stand by my opinion that while the first two books were works of creative genius, Suzanne Collins seriously phoned it in on the third. It […]
A Pop of White
On Monday night I dashed through one of the quickest books I’ve ever read: Betty White’s latest memoir. It took me about 40 minutes, cover to cover. That’s 258 pages. And no, I wasn’t speed-reading. The chapters are really short, there are lots of pictures and filler pages, and the margins are wide. It was […]
A Fairy Tale Quartet
It hurts me a little to admit this, but I am kind of a snob about certain kinds of books. One genre that I almost never read is romance fiction. I mean, sure, when I was a teenager, I might have grabbed a few bodice-rippers off the romance shelf at the bookstore, looking for one […]
What To Expect When You’re Expecting
After finding out I was pregnant, one of the first things I did was make sure I got a copy of the so-called pregnancy bible, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Now in its fourth edition, it has sold over 16 million copies, at least according to the flag on the cover. It also has […]