This morning a notice from Amazon popped up on my screen. The message said a customer had liked my review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant  but made no mention of whether or not he or she actually bought the book. (Blog 5/5/15)  Next I was reminded I’d written 13 reviews on Amaz

Susan Stoner and I have been producing, Just Read it, a 10 minute YouTube book review series for over two years.  When I first proposed it, I doubted Susan or her cameraman husband, George, would be keen.  But they agreed to give it a try, and we’ve been having fun ever since.  W

In August, I read a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Living with a Wild God. (Blog 8/11/14)  The work centers around an experience in her early life which she describes as a shift in her level of consciousness.  Having had a similar experience in my 40s, I decided to get m

The other day a friend was gossiping about a party his daughter threw for a few friends after their final year of college.  Much of the conversation was about how to pay off their student loans.  One young woman volunteered she had no debt.  Her grandparents had provide

Some friends dropped by the other day with a book for me to read, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Published in 1937 by a Zora Neal Huston, the tribute on the cover was written by Alice Walker:  There is no book more important to me than this one. I’d never heard of the author so, b

A while ago, I wrote a blog mourning the passing of Tony Hillerman (9/25/12) and how, unlike him, many writers of mystery novels give us complex plots but protagonists with little depth. They forget readers have to care about their sleuths, enough to make them flinch when the door to

Recently, I discovered that on Amazon’s book rankings, the works of John Keats and William Wordsworth are listed 796,426 and 2,337,250 respectively, only slightly higher than mine. (“Counter Culture,” by Caleb Crain, Harper’s, July 2015 pg.82.)  Naturally, I, a modest wr

“You mustn’t be so open-mined that your brains fall out.” That’s the advice avant garde poet, Marianne Moore once gave to her fellow poet, E. E. Cummings. Whether she had any influence over him or not is unknown but a new biography of the man reveals he was clear about his opi

Hamlet marveled, “What a piece of work is man,” but that isn’t the half of it.  Two new books are out which talk about man’s place in the universe, both reviewed by Tim Flannery in Harper’s.  Dian Ackerman, whose affinity for understanding nature is undisputed by most,

Richard Dawkins has published the first of his two part memoir, An Appetite for Wonder,  and John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, has taken the work apart with surgical deftness. He depicts Dawkins as a man who is facile in his thinking