Would you judge me if I said I hadn’t read A Christmas Carol until this December? And I’m an English teacher! Luckily the student-lead book club at my school decided they wanted to make sure they had read this Christmas classic before they went off to college. I’m glad they made this selection because it was certainly time for me to get my feet wet with this classic. This review is hard to write. What’s there really to say about one of the most well-known […]
How to Account for A Life?
Carol Shields’s Swan was the first of her oeuvre that I encountered in a Women’s Literature course in grad school. I enjoyed her prose and engrossing plots and her knack for point-of-views that are unique and refreshing. I read The Stone Diaries for my bookclub’s December pick and it was…interesting. The plot is the story of Daisy Goodwill, which begins in Manitoba, Canada pre-WWI. The narrator sounds like Daisy herself telling the story of how her parents met and she was conceived. Daisy spends most […]
Bridging Friendship
The Bridge to Terebithia is another book I’ve never read before. And while it’s a YA book, and a young YA novel at that, it was still an all around good story. A girl moves in next door to a family that’s struggling to make ends me rural Maryland/Virginia. The girl and her family are wealthy but are looking to get away from the rat-race of D.C. The boy and girl soon become friends, although the boy was reluctant to be her friend because they’re […]
Will the Real Ron Swanson Please Stand Up?
One of the best things I liked about “Parks & Rec” was Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson. I liked the subtle humor as well as Ron’s philosophy that we should all be off the grid and fend for ourselves. It was almost like seeing a modern day interpretation of Henry David Thoreau. With better facial hair. When Mr. Offerman came out with this first memoir, Paddle Your Own Canoe I was interested to know more about the man behind Ron Swanson. Sadly, this felt like two […]
Too Many Languages, Too Little Time!
I’m a language nerd. When I was young I was that kid who would check out those books on kids around the world to see what customs and languages people spoke across the globe. During the summers I would choose a language and check out one of those learn-on-your-own books. This would last only a few weeks, but it left me with bits and pieces of random languages. In college I was lucky enough to live in Spain for a year and finally learn enough […]
A Wrinkle in Character Development
I’m late coming to Madeleine L’Engle’s The Time Quartet. I’ve heard about since college, but never was interested in reading the series. This year, the book club decided to do a Science Fiction read and needed some help selecting a title. This was one proposed by several of the members and ultimately won as the choice for November. This pushed me to jump and see what A Wrinkle in Time was all about. I had a mixed read of the novel. On one hand it […]
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