At my mom’s funeral service, as I was getting a sympathetic hug from my great-aunt Joyce, I heard her ask close by my ear, “Are you on Facebook?” I avoided joining Facebook for a really long time, for many reasons. One, I have a MySpace account, but I hardly ever…
24 Hour Read-a-thon — on the 24th!
The 24 Hour Read-a-thon is new to me — like Book Blogger Appreciation Week, I first heard about it from the book bloggers I follow on Twitter. I thought it would be cool to do, but then life got busy (who am I kidding? My life is always busy!), and…
It’s been 8 days; do I feel sad enough?
Not long after midnight on October 14, my mother quietly passed away into the next world. I spent hours on the phone with people — family, and the funeral director, and various nursing home and hospice staff — and got the arrangements made, and I flew to Boston early last…
Discovering a mesmerizing novel: Florida
Last spring, I bought two books by a new-to-me author from the clearance shelves at Hastings. Her name is Christine Schutt, and I’d never heard of her. Besides the clearance price of $2.99, I remember two other things that drew me to the novel Florida: first, that’s also the title…
Reading, writing, and breathing
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.—Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854) I am thinking this evening about quiet desperation. My feeling tonight is not quiet, but angry and restless and relentless desperation.—written by me, on Sept. 24, 2009 This past Thursday evening, I slid into a terrible dark…
My review (finally!!!) of Daphne – by Justine Picardie
I received a copy of the novel Daphne by Justine Picardie through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I’m grateful to the publisher, Bloomsbury, and to LibraryThing for the opportunity to read and review this book. I own 16 books by Daphne du Maurier. I confess that I’ve only read a…
“Let’s have some cooperation here!”
When I was in the sixth or seventh grade, I found among our endless piles of paper an old newsletter from my preschool. There was a note about me in the newsletter, among the stories for parents about their children’s doings. I don’t remember the incident itself – I would…
Something about age eight
Last evening after supper, I was alone in the house putting away clean dishes, thinking. Grandma was outside on the patio watching Jeff and the boys toss the football around the backyard. I was drying things and putting them in their places, then loading the dirty supper dishes in the…
Just making a note…
I need to shut down and get to bed VERY SOON, but am making a “mental note” of sorts before the day is completely over. When I woke this morning, I told Jeff I’d just had a bad dream. I didn’t say what about. Later in the day, I kept…
BBAW, and how I feel like a poser
I recently gave in to the hype and signed up for a Twitter account. Yes, it can be addicting, especially those first couple of weeks, but I don’t think I’ve gone overboard with it. One thing I’ve found is that book bloggers — those people whose blogs are about books…