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The Guest Cat
The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide is a slender but rich meditation on fate. What force directs the twists of our lives – or are all events random and therefore beyond our control? When a tiny,...
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Quiet Dell: Tragedy and Redemption
I loved Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips. It is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, containing every necessary element for a great book: compelling and fully-developed characters, resonant...
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The Soul of a Book Lover
The task of writing a review of An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine is daunting. Why? Because I don’t want to write anything that might keep someone from reading this book. Everybody should...
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Letters: Recipe Shared with Julia Child
What do I have in common with Julia Child? Not the art of French cooking. I cannot follow a recipe to save my life. But Julia Child loved writing and receiving letters, and so do I. And in our love for...
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Books About Life – and Cats
As far as books go, it is always the year of the cat. Just take a look at any bookstore and you can find more than a few books about cats (Cat Daddy, Cat Sense, How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to...
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Robert Burns and the Clarinda Letters
Robert Burns is a favorite poet of mine. I don’t know which came first, my fascination with Scotland or with Burns, but one feeds the other and I am besotted. Through his poems, Burns takes me to...
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The Gentlest Art
In 1907, E.V. Lucas published a lovely collection of letters under the title, The Gentlest Art. Letter writing is the art referred to and the letters chosen by Lucas illustrate his point of gentility –...
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Caught in A Dark and Twisted Tide
Summer is here but I will not be jumping into any bodies of water to cool off, thanks to my beloved Sharon Bolton. A favorite harbinger of summer is the release of her latest thriller and A Dark and...
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Sisters Lost and Found, in the Land of Shadows
Land of Shadows, Rachel Howzell Hall’s latest novel, is a riveting exploration of crime and its repercussions in the poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Together with her previous thriller, No One Knows...
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Judith Frank: Choosing Life
A twin loses his brother in a Palestinian suicide bombing of an Israeli cafe and finds himself guardian of two orphaned children. The twin, Daniel, is gay; his partner, Matt, is a goy and viewed by...
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7th Anniversary of a Great Year of Reading
Seven years ago I began my year of reading a book a day. What a great year it was! A year of adventure, comfort, escape, and wisdom, so much wisdom shared with me by the writers of all the books I...
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