Window Thinking
The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories. – Clint …
I don’t know why or when I started my sort-of-tradition, but Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future pretty regularly show up on my December reading lists. I’m a big fan of Jim Dale (thanks to his marvelous narration of the Harry Potter series) and I usually listen to Jim Dale …
I first learned of Katharine Hayhoe several years ago when I participated in the Creation Care group at the church we were attending. One of the fellow group members was excited that Hayhoe was coming to Anchorage and we would had opportunity to hear her speak. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend any of her …
Circling back to a book I read last month….In the final pages of The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, author Helene Hanff includes a story that I keep thinking about. The book is an account of Hanff’s trip to London – a place she imagined and interacted with throughout her 20 year pen pal relationship with …
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. (from Wikipedia) Realizing that I tend to like epistolary novels, I’ve been on the lookout for them and recently I found this clever book by Caroline Preston. Preston assembles real newspaper clippings, photos, and other period …
If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much. I have no idea why I have only just got around to reading this delightful book. I love bookstores and epistolary tales and this is a wonderful collection of letters sent back and forth across the …
Richard’s entire body is a costume discarded, the party over….His limbs are petulant children, unreachable through begging, bribery, ultimatums, or sweet talk.He tries to imagine the war beneath his skin; the invaded countries of his neurons and muscles overwhelmed, decimated; the neutral territories of bone, ligament, and tendon rendered useless by the horrific destruction surrounding …
A chicken knows only what it can see. A chicken’s life is full of magic. Lo and behold. A fictional story that read rather like a memoir, this short novel held so many wonderful, accurate descriptions of backyard chickens. And I loved it. Because…..backyard chickens!!! The author used caring for these feathered friends to serve …
When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame …
I wrote a short piece for the members of my congregation in the church newsletter. By accident I learned that the piece was being used in homiletic classes in my seminary in St. Louis. Well, if it was good enough for theologians, it should be good enough for a wider public. Therefore I reused the …
All the long afternoon they sang, and talked, and ate, and Dicey didn’t think about her boats, the ones she was working on or the ones she was dreaming about, except once, when they came to the line in Momma’s old song that said “bring me a boat will carry two.” She could see that …
Our brains are wired differently, and we have to figure out how to make them work. A car accident. A brain injury. And the hard work to recover a life. Or rather, the hard work to learn a new way of being in the world. Revisiting Still Alice started me on a Lisa Genova reading …
Every child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the mutated gene. The discovery of this mutation made genetic testing possible for anyone living at risk. The test definitively determines genetic status. A positive test result means the person has the mutation and will develop HD. To date, 90 percent …
Mom, what does it feel like? What does what feel like? Having Alzheimer’s. Can you feel that you have it right now?Well, I know I’m not confused or repeating myself right now, but just a few minutes ago, I couldn’t find ‘cream cheese,’ and I was having a hard time participating in the conversation with you and …
His father had been the kind of man who just – had these children and then disappeared, not even giving them his name, not even marrying Momma. This 6th book in the Tillerman series wasn’t my favorite, but Voigt does a marvelous job filling out the characters of Sammy and James as they go in …
Doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. This was an interesting enough exploration of what if I had followed that trail through life instead of this one and I read to the end, but I got tired of being dropped into so many different, undeveloped scenarios as the main …
Mom calls before bed and doesn’t sound that tired. She asks me all about Safer’s family. When I tell her Safer doesn’t go to school, she says they sound like really nice bohemians. When I tell her that Safer plans to teach me the secret of truly excellent scrambled eggs, she says they sound like …
There are few things more violent than two cars colliding at high speed. Metal screams and glass sprays and rubber smokes. Within it what chance does a human body have? We are liquid and tissue. As fragile a thing as there is. It’s like how people describe it, and not. It’s slow, and not. The …
When it comes down to it, the only question that matters is this: If nothing in the world ever changes, what type of man are you gonna be? This short YA story pulled me straight into the bright young mind of a prep school, college bound kid who is trying to make sense of his …
I mean, if everything is already set in stone, why try? I prefer to think that we’re choosing in every moment what happens next. A magical phone in this story serves as the mechanism for a bit of time travel and the exploration of choices and consequences. Honestly I had a little trouble finishing this …
I believe all words have their own music. And along with that music, I believe words contain worlds of words and meanings that are, more often than not, locked beneath the surface. Poetry is what happens when words are opened up, and those worlds within are made visible, and the music behind the words is …
Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and …
His carryall in his hand, Bullet jogged down the driveway….The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had …
Having worked through most of my puzzle collection this past year, I purchased a new one this month. This Cavallini & Co Bees and Honey puzzle was fun to put together and reminded me of a book I stopped to read while shelving picture books in the library a few years ago, so I checked it …