“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez Read more
First Words
“Tolstoy clearly never spent any time with my happy family.” Appetites: A Cookbook Anthony Bourdain Read more
First Words
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” Paul Clifford… Read more
New Sunday feature – First Words
I really enjoyed doing my regular Sunday feature, Quotables, but I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and I’ve begun to feel like I want to try something new. So for 2017, we’re going to look at First Words – the first lines of famous books, of the books on my shelves, of books I want to… Read more
Bad news for romance authors
A friend of mine pointed this story out to me: All Romance E-books closing down and ripping off its authors The gist of the story is this: the website, All Romance E-books (ARe) is closing down as of 12/31/2016. That would be bad news no matter what – I love the way that ebooks and self-publishing have given us such… Read more
Sad but true
Male Readers Need To Read Books With Strong Female Characters, Too
I wanted to share this article from Bustle.com because I think it’s really important. I remember reading some jerk whining about the new Ghostbusters movie (for the record: very funny). He was whinging about how there were no characters that his young son could look up to — apparently because the main characters were all women. There was a lot of… Read more
Review: Delta Lady – a memoir by Rita Coolidge
Strange fact: as a kid, I had goldfish named Kris and Rita. I knew who Kris Kristofferson was, and I had some vague idea who Rita Coolidge was – mostly I knew there was an epic romance there. That more than anything prompted me to read Delta Lady: A Memoir by Rita Coolidge with Michael Walker. What I liked about the way Coolidge… Read more
Have you read any of these “lost books”?
From BBC/Culture: 10 Lost Books you Should Read Now I am really interested in The Glass Pearls and The Vet’s Daughter! Read more
New on the Shelves…
I don’t think I requested this one, but it certainly sounds good – The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick: Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Pepper lives a simple life. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a.m., just as he did when his wife, Miriam, was alive. He dresses in the same gray slacks and mustard sweater vest, waters his… Read more