• Books and Reading

    Reading Report, Vol. 23: My Literary Goals for 2025

    January 8, 2025 - By 

    As I promised in my first post of this new year, I am back this week with an update on my reading life. With all the stress of renovating, selling our house, packing up and moving across the country, and just normal daily life “stuff”, reading became very difficult for me in 2024. I would start books, only to drop them a chapter or two in. I would turn on an audio book only to mentally tune it out while my mind filled with distracted thoughts and to-do lists. In the evenings when I would normally have picked up a…

  • Books and Reading

    “My Family and Other Animals” Book Review

    May 2, 2020 - By 

    If you are looking for some light fiction that is also written in sparkling prose, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is the book for you. I really cannot say enough good things about this read. It was sheer delight. The book begins with a family of four children and their widowed mother tired of their humdrum average British life. On a whim, they sell their house and move to the island of Corfu and rent a house sight unseen. The story is told from Gerald’s perspective as the youngest brother, describing his family with a loving touch, though…

  • Books and Reading

    “Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories” Book Review

    April 26, 2020 - By 

    Last Sunday I had the great luxury of several hours in which to read entirely for fun, and in that time I finished Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories. This book is a truly enjoyable collection of little self-contained mysteries, each in one chapter, all cleverly solved by the unassuming and unlikely character of Miss Marple. The elderly spinster has a keen mind and a rather uncanny ability to relate seemingly mundane happenings in her small village to crimes on a larger scale. This combination of sleuthing super-powers never fails to take those around her by surprise, given…

  • Books and Reading - Uncategorized

    Reviewing E. M. Forster’s “A Room with a View”

    February 6, 2020 - By 

    Before I get into my thoughts on A Room with a View, I need to apologize to those of you who subscribe to posts via email. The post I published yesterday had a major formatting problem when it transferred to email, and none of the books I was trying to share with you were visible. I’m so sorry for that inconvenience. If you click over to the actual blog website, you can see all the titles and links there, but I should really have been more careful about checking that everything was going to work before hitting publish. Now on…

  • Books and Reading - Uncategorized

    Adding to My TBR, One Great Prime Reading Deal at a Time

    February 5, 2020 - By 

    If you have Amazon Prime, and you read Kindle books, then you probably know about the newer perk of Prime Reading deals. But if not, let me tell you, this is one of my favorite ways to add to my (never-ending) to-be-read list! Books available on Prime Reading are free to “check-out” for an indefinite period of time, and you can have up to 10 Kindle books in your Prime Reading library at a time. It’s like having a library card on Amazon! Pretty great, right? The thing is, the choices in Prime Reading change frequently, and I’m not sure…