Thursday’s Child

Harper Flute and her family live on dry, scrubby grasslands in Australia. Her father never meant to be a farmer, but he took the land the government offered him after World War I, and now he scrapes a living from it by trapping rabbits and selling their pelts. One child after another has stretched the family resources, and [...]

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Sunday Salon: Can You Ever Have Too Many Books?

There was a time when I only bought books that I was ready to read. I was a poor college student, then a recent graduate. I couldn’t afford to buy many books, and I certainly couldn’t afford shelves to put them on. I’d stack books that I found at used bookstores around the house, stuff [...]

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The Day the Falls Stood Still

It’s 1915, and Bess Heath is a happy, well-to-do student at Loretto Academy, a Catholic school on a bluff in Niagara Falls, Canada. Her window looks out toward the falls, and she imagines that the flecks of silver she sees in the mist are prayers. When her father loses his job at the Niagara Power Company, [...]

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The Writing Class

In Jincy Willett’s 2008 novel, Amy Gallup teaches an extension class on writing fiction. She was once a writer herself: her first novel was published when she was only twenty-two, and she wrote a couple of decent novels after that. But when her husband died, her motivation died with him, and now she makes a [...]

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The English Major

My book club, like a lot of all-female book clubs, tends to mostly read books by and about women. If we read a book by or about men, it’s usually either a classic like On the Road or a nonfiction book about a topic of interest like Into the Wild. One of the women in [...]

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Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

When I started working on my master’s in theology, the class I dreaded more than any other was philosophy. It just seemed like so much gobbledygook to me—epistemology, ontology, noumenology, blahblahdelogy. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that all these fancy words were just ways to dress up a lot of ideas that either amounted [...]

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Citizen of the Galaxy

I’ll never forget the first time I took a real book suggestion from my father. I was about twelve or thirteen, and he gave me Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel. At the time, I’d never really read any science fiction — my taste tended more to fantasy and endless re-readings of Rebecca. I [...]

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Sunday Salon: Help! Time for Christmas Shopping

Dear readers, I need your help! I have a huge number of nieces and nephews, and every year I struggle with Christmas gifts for them. This year, for the first time, most of them are old enough to read or to enjoy being read to, so I’ve decided to get each of them a book. [...]

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The Regency (Morland Dynasty #13)

I’m now over one-third of the way through Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s 32-volume historical fiction series, The Morland Dynasty. In less than two years, I’ll be done. Each book covers a period in English history through the eyes of the Morland family, a wealthy, well-connected Yorkshire family. The characters are a good mix of likable and unlikable, the [...]

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Lord of the Rings Readalong

As I mentioned on Sunday, several bloggers and I have been wanting to reread J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Eva, Maree, the Literary Omnivore, and I decided to share the experience and wanted to invite along anyone else who wants to join. Starting January 1, 2010, we’ll be reading one book from the series (including The Hobbit) each month with [...]

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