In the face of depressing news I always ask myself: What can we set against it? And I always end up with the same answer: The pursuit of beauty and [...]
I just clicked the Send button to submit my last book review. Until now I told myself that this would be my last. I don't want to have to read [...]
Herta and I, Wiesbaden, 2002 Today would have been my Aunt Herta's birthday. I like to remember loved ones on their birthdays, and since Herta is one of [...]
{August Break 8/6: I'm Reading...} I can never just read one book! My current bedtime reading is Yossi Klein Halevi's Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. I loved his book Like [...]
The other day I cast about for a comfort book, something pleasant to read in the tub after a busy day. Usually that would mean an Agatha Christie mystery for [...]
I didn't read the book for the December meeting of the Memoir Workshop I teach at StoryStudio Chicago. If the instructor doesn't read the assigned book, that's pretty bad, right? [...]
I just finished a book I really liked, one I had been meaning to read for a while, and I'm sad it's done. That's the hallmark of a good book, [...]
The bookshelves of other people are fascinating. What do they tell you? When I'm invited to other people's homes, I appreciate when one of the rooms I get to be in [...]
My most meaningful read of 2013 was, without a doubt, Julia Cameron's The Right to Write. It transformed my understanding of the creative process; it has me writing Morning Pages [...]
Sometimes it is interesting to retrace where something began, when a meaningful connection was made. My interview with Susannah Conway appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books last week, and [...]
When my grandparents were expelled from their hometown in Czechoslovakia after World War II, they lost their house and all their possessions, but the loss my grandfather lamented the most [...]
We've been dealing with a few health issues lately (everything seems OK now), and so I've slacked off blogging, but yesterday as I retired to my bathtub with the newest [...]
Once in a while we read a classic in my Advanced Memoir Workshop, and this June the group chose E.B. White's One Man's Meat. The book proved hard to get from the library [...]
Edmund de Waals' memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes was my favorite memoir of 2011, and yet I am still trying to figure out why because it defies so many of the [...]
I found myself developing a love/hate relationship Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World. My Advanced Memoir Workshop had picked it for our April reading. First of all, At Home [...]
I usually don't feature shopping tips on this blog, but I just ordered these book covers notecards as birthday gifts for book lover friends, and I thought I'd share this [...]
I loved how the CEO of Penguin, John Makinson, differentiated between book readers and book owners when asked, in Monday's article in the Wall Street Journal, whether there will be a [...]
Danielle Ofri told my writing group back in January that those book reviews on amazon make a huge difference to a writer, not only in terms of feedback but in [...]