Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe

Visit Your Book Group to read the full text of Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” It’s creepy – not suprisingly.

Sunday Classic for Bookish Kids: The Little House books

There are so many interesting resources online about Laura Ingalls Wilder that I will not try to incorporate them into the narrative (with one exception); see a list of links at the end of the post. Throughout a good portion of my childhood I read and re-read most of the “Little House” series, Laura Ingalls……

Sunday Classic – Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

This is a short commentary on a long book, meant for those who haven’t read it and wonder if they might want to do so. I’m writing this quickly to fulfill my commitment to provide a Sunday Classic review; I will do better next week. Topics in the book are hope, study, death, work, marriage, divorce,……

Sunday Classics – Jane Eyre

As a child, I lost myself so completely in books that when I recollect reading, I don’t envision myself looking at the printed page. Instead I am taking a swan dive right into the open book as if into a deep pond. This was the case with Jane Eyre, which I read when I was……

Tell Me A Story.

Let’s tell stories. Children, read to your parents. Parents, read to your children and to each other.  Friends, siblings, take turns reading as the rest of you listen. With book in hand, (or eBook on phone or tablet or laptop), gather under a tree, around a campfire or at the kitchen table – such stories……

Five over Fifty

Here are five authors who started writing or publishing after age fifty, or who continued their writing careers later into their lives. It’s not too late – ever! Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes was published when he was 67 years old. It won a Pulitzer Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_McCourtAnnie Proulx – Author of Brokeback Mountain and The……

The Genevieve Driscoll Reading List

Cover page for my grandmother’s reading list My grandmother, Genevieve O’Connor Driscoll, was a reader’s reader. As the end of her life drew closer, working around significant vision loss due to macular degeneration, she read with laser focus for as long as she could. Genevieve was an eclectic reader, enthusiastic discusser of books – both……

The Book or the Movie?

This is a trick question. For me it’s always the book. However, I did recently see the newly-released movie Little Women, and it was much better than I expected. It may have had something to do with the fact that I was the only person in the theater at Sperry’s Moviehouse in Holland, MI (https://www.sperrysmoviehouse.com/browsing/),……

Once Upon A River

Format: Audio, from local libraryAuthor: Diane SettlefieldNarrator: Jane StevensonPublisher: Simon & Schuster AudioFinished March 4 2020Source: I checked out the audio version from my lovely local library. This is a book about storytelling – an art that predates the written word. As such, this book, narrated by the excellent Juliet Stevenson, is best experienced in……