From My Shelves to Yours

Edited to add: This giveaway is closed. Winners’ names are listed below. In my ongoing effort to keep books from taking over my tiny condo, I’m once again passing along some of my recently read books to you. Here’s what’s up for grabs: After Claude by Iris Owens. Paperback advance review copy (no introduction). Cover [...]

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The Homecoming

After spending several weeks immersed in National Book Award finalists, it was a relief last week to turn my attention to the good solid storytelling of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and The Homecoming, the 24th book in the Morland Dynasty series. The book opens in 1885 and follows the Morlands almost to the end of the 19th [...]

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Sunday Salon: Reading Plans

I’ve always been a planner. I like to make lists, and I love the feeling of accomplishment when I can cross things off. Although I’m open to changing  plans as my whims change or unforeseen opportunities arise, it’s reassuring to have a game plan. It didn’t take me long to discover that a love of [...]

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Chasing Francis

Chase Falson, pastor of a successful New England evangelical church, is frustrated. After years of success in his ministry, he’s starting to think none of it has any meaning at all. When he breaks down and shares his true feelings with his congregation, the response is as bad as you might expect. Now in disgrace [...]

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The Uncommon Reader (audio)

I am, as a general rule, suspicious of books whose central premise relies on putting real people in contrived situations that never happened. So Alan Bennett’s book about Queen Elizabeth becoming a bookworm gave me pause. It seemed too gimmicky, too clearly engineered to garner the affections of bookish Anglophiles everywhere. And cutesy comic novels [...]

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Lord of Misrule

Although I was rooting for Great House to win the National Book Award, I must admit it was pretty cool to finish this book late yesterday evening and then turn on my computer and see that as I was reading the last few chapters, author Jaimy Gordon was being given the big prize. Having read [...]

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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (audio)

Do you ever have books on your TBR list that you know next to nothing about? I’ve had The Man Who Was Thursday on my list for years, for the sole reason that it’s G.K. Chesterton’s most famous novel, and I’ve wanted to read more Chesterton (aside from Orthodoxy and some of the Father Brown [...]

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Sunday Salon: Peeved!

I’ve been thinking this week about bookish pet peeves, those things in books that drive me crazy. These pet peeves are, in my mind, not necessarily marks of poor quality, like bad characterization. Nor are they failed attempts at doing something cool, like a complex plot that spins out of control. What I’m thinking of [...]

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After Claude

How’s this for squeaking in under the wire? When I learned about the NYRB Reading Week hosted by The Literary Stew and Coffeespoons, I had just received a review copy of one of the newest NYRB books through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. The book, After Claude by Iris Owens, was first published in 1973. [...]

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I Hotel

When it’s all said and done, you might have a compilation of events, and you might have a story with meaning. Someone says, don’t worry about details, just get the stories. Someone else says, get the details and the hard facts, and then you can build a case for a story. Someone says a good [...]

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