Of course I’m going to start with books. Have you met me? These were two of my favorite novels this year, so much so that I picked both of them for my book club in September. In part I loved them because they feature characters my age or near enough but especially because every one…
I love picture books. I especially like ones that make me laugh out loud. It helps when all you want to do when you turn to the last page is go back to the first. Here are three you won’t get tired of reading over and over again, which is good, because you’ll have to.…
Read more Three great new picture books for the kids this Christmas
You’ve all heard the story, how someone challenged Ernest Hemingway to write a story in six words, and how he came back with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It is only fitting in this Twittering age that Smith Magazine, an online magazine devoted to storytelling in all its forms, would invite readers to contribute…
Over the last year I’ve been rereading the Honor Harrington series, those David Weber novels concerning the necessarily prolonged life of one Honor Harrington, an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy. It’s set some few thousand years in the future when mankind has moved out of the Solar System and scattered itself across the galaxy…
A novel set in southern Italy in the 1100’s. Maria is the daughter of a robber baron who is first rescued from a Saracen attack, after which she is married off to the strongest and most ambitious of her rescuers. “Your father is a robber, he’ll never be anything else. Roger just wants to be…
Ten-year old Keladry of Mindelan wants to be a knight. Problem: She’s a girl, and it’s been a hundred years since there were lady knights in Tortall, with the sole exception of Alanna the Lioness, who has her own books. After a throw-down with a spidren (a big scary immortal spider that eats people), Kel…
Read more No allowances are made for her gender, and none have to be.
The amount of detail about the towns (living and dead) and buildings and monuments during Robert Byron’s ten-month journey to Iran and Afghanistan in 1933–34 is overwhelming when you’re reading it with your feet up at home. It would very likely be amazing if you were standing in front of what’s he’s describing. At Hamadan…
In At Large and At Small, essayist Anne Fadiman (she of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader fame, one of my favorite books about reading) writes a dozen exceptionally well-written essays on such disparate subjects as coffee, mail and a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Allow me to allow her to speak for herself.…
Seldom have I read a mystery novel more in the moment than Richard Thompson’s Big Wheat. It’s the summer of 1919, and heartbroken by lover Mabel who has cast him off, twenty-three year old North Dakota farm hand Charlie Kreuger pins his abusive father to the kitchen table with a carving knife and hits the road…
Read more Worst of all, it looked as though women were about to get the vote.
What a delightfully informative little book! I don’t know how they crammed so much information into just 200 pages (reminds me of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and this one doesn’t have recipes). (And why not, I ask? Hmmph.) The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar,…
