I mentioned on Facebook recently that I’d been privileged to interview best-selling author, Anne Hillerman.  The daughter of Tony Hillerman, she picked up writing his popular Southwest Indian mysteries that featured detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.  This April, Anne Hillerman

  I’m neither a history scholar nor a psychiatrist, but I’ve always felt discrimination has more to do with being either the top or underdog in society rather than about race or politics or religion.  Something in human nature abhors equality.  Slavery, the vilest f

I hadn’t ordered the book.  It was sandwiched between two purchases I’d made from Alexander McCall Smith’s series, The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Was this a mistake in the shipment I wondered or a bonus of some kind? Not knowing, I set the volume aside and plunged int

The day before the coronavirus prompted the library to close at my retirement center, like everyone else, I rushed to the stacks to gather as much reading material as I could carry. My neighbors, being more nimble than I, had left the shelves almost bare by the time I arrived. All tha

  The month of May marks a new beginning for Just Read it and for me.  Just Read it is the 10 minute YouTube video program Susan Stoner and I have co-hosted over the last 4 years.  During each show, a Portland, Oregon author joined us to discuss a book from the New York Times B

Appropriate to the season, a friend gave me a gift certificate to Powell’s bookstore.  Overjoyed, I hurried off to use it before it got lost in the midst of my move to the retirement center.  Choosing a book wasn’t hard.  I keep a list on my refrigerator door. 

A reader wrote to say she had some questions about Alice Munro’s short story, “Wenlock Edge,” and wondered if I had any insights.  Curious, I read the story then searched for reviewer’s remarks on the web.  I found few.  One commentator did point out that the tr

Events around the globe don’t seem to be pointing to a bright future. Besides polluting the environment, we seem bent on killing each other.  Perhaps that’s why the number of articles about how to stay happy seems to be multiplying faster than rabbits in old Mr. McGregor’s

When Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time  came out several years ago, someone hid money at the back of one copy to see if anyone  got to the end of this complex work on cosmology.  The book hit the best seller list and remained there for 4 years, but no on

I’ve never read a book by John Updike, mainly because he was never required in college and I identified him with “the boys,” who included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and touching upon Ernest Hemmingway and Norman Mailer, writers whom I have read but whose world view I don’t much