I mentioned in my post Vacation Book List that one of my favorite summer authors is Kristin Hannah. I just finished another one of her excellent books: Magic Hour. Following her usual themes, Hannah wrote this book about sisters and set it in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. But from there, she took some unique departures. The […]
fiction
Vacation Book List
I realized today that I haven’t officially recognized the start of summer vacation on the blog yet. Hooray! Usually, summer for me means travel time. Sometimes it’s a few short trips, sometimes it’s something bigger (like the cruise in Alaska last summer). Additionally, for the past 7 years, the end of August has always meant […]
Fifty Shades of Not Happening
Whenever a book craze sweeps the nation, I feel compelled to check it out. Sometimes I am disappointed, as in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Other times, I am reasonably satisfied, as in the Twilight series or The Hunger Games trilogy. And of course, there was that one time that reading an intensely popular novel changed […]
The Difficult Read
I’m reading a book right now that I know is going to take awhile to read. Not because it’s particularly lengthy, but because of the difficult subject matter. It’s about the life of U.S. Ambassador William Dodd and his family during their post in Berlin, right after the election of Hitler as chancellor, and through […]
Every Last One
Spoiler alert: In this blog post, I intend to give you major reason not to read Every Last One, and then flip it around to tell you why you should read it anyway. Ready? I recently listened to this book on audiobook. Though beautifully written, it was, without a doubt, the most sad, depressing, difficult […]
The Perfect Reading Day
Today I had one of those perfect reading days. I read almost an entire book- about 350 pages of the 400 in the novel- in one sitting. It was glorious. Here are the factors required for a perfect reading day: 1. An unspecified chunk of time. You can’t have any serious obligations to rush off […]