Feathers (audio)

Jacqueline Woodson’s 2008 Newbery honor book takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s famous line, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Frannie, the 6th grade girl who narrates the story, muses on this line throughout the book, as she learns how to bring hope into her life. Hope is badly needed in Frannie’s world. Her mother [...]

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Sunday Salon: Shutting Off the Fire Hose

You’ve probably heard the phrase “drinking from the fire hose,” referring to trying to drink more water than you can possibly take in. But have you ever felt like you’re reading from a fire hose? I certainly do. I know my towering TBR (currently at 231 books) is the subject of near constant fretting around [...]

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A Lemon and a Star

There are two big categories of children’s books that I love. First is the kind where a group of children — often siblings, but sometimes just friends or schoolfellows – have magical adventures together. Think of Edward Eager’s books, or Diana Wynne Jones’s, or Five Children and It, or the Chronicles of Narnia, or Harry Potter. Then [...]

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The Home-Maker

For this year’s Persephone Reading Weekend (hosted by Claire and Verity), I decided to read one of the newest additions to my Persephone Book collection, The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which I received from Caroline as part of the Persephone Secret Santa exchange this past year. I believe this was also among the first [...]

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Interpreter of Maladies

Dear Jhumpa Lahiri, It’s not you, it’s me. Let’s never forget what we had. Cordially, Jenny One of the greatest pleasures of book blogging, for me, has been the reassurance that I am not alone. No matter what obscure thing I read, someone else has read it; no matter what classic I’ve neglected, someone else [...]

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Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (audio)

My stepmother, a retired nurse, has frequently made the joke that there’s a reason we use the phrase the “practice of medicine.” As much as we’d like to think our doctors know precisely what they’re doing, a lot of medicine involves educated guesswork by fallible people. Granted, our doctors are highly educated, and after years [...]

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The Devotion of Suspect X

This crime novel by Keigo Higashino, an award-winning mega-hit in Japan, is not quite a mystery, not quite a thriller. We know who the killer is from the start and we know how and why the deed was done. And there’s not much in the way of action after the murder that launches the story. [...]

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Sunday Salon: The E-Reading Experience

As many of you know by now, after all my dithering over the whole question of an e-reader a few weeks ago, I finally did decide to buy one. When I happened upon a Sony Touch 600 E-reader on Ebay for $99, I snapped it right up. This is not, for what it’s worth, the [...]

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The Fisher King (Le roi pêcheur)

For an author with so much stature, Julien Gracq led a quiet life. He was thoroughly disillusioned with most of the literary movements, schools of thought, and politics of his time: he handed back his Parti Communiste membership card after the German-Soviet pact of nonaggression; he criticized Sartre and Camus and their littérature engagée for being [...]

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The Scramble for Africa

In 1876, the great European powers – France, Britain, Germany, Italy — were almost completely uninterested in empire-building. Colonies cost money and labor they didn’t have, especially now that the slave trade had been abolished. Better to let African middlemen bring a trickle of export goods to the coast from the center of an unexplored continent, and buy and sell [...]

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