I posted a picture of Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword on social media this week and mentioned that it’s one of my comfort reads. My friend Josie commented, “I would love a list of your Top 10 books that I might to have heard of already.” I thought that was a genius idea, and not too hard to pull out of […]
Fox & Sons Books closed its doors this week, the latest in the long line of big-box brick-and-mortar bookstores to bow to the ever-expanding Amazon.com.
In our study this week, my Bible study group looked at the passage in Romans that says, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). I wrote a note in the margin of my book: Jane Eyre. I adore the novel Jane Eyre. I have multiple copies and […]
I learned a new word today. I love learning new words, particularly when they’re multi-syllabic and fun to say. Today’s word was “concatenation.” Both multi-syllabic and fun (and defined as a series of interconnected things or events). Evidently, listening to NPR does make you smarter. It reminded me of some of my favorite words of the past and my adventures […]
I’ve never written a poetry review before, so perhaps I’m doing this all wrong. Perhaps I should talk of meter and rhyme, cadence and word choice. But I’m not going to do that. I shall leave such things to those better versed in the criticism of poetry. Instead, I shall approach these verses as a reader. For, though I’ve studied […]
Almost a year ago I began working with Dr. Martha MacCullough, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Cairn University to shape her manuscript on educational philosophy into a book. I learned a lot about the editing process, educational philosophy, page layout, and the awesome name pairings of educational scholars (seriously, “Chubb and Moe”? “Long and Frye”? “Bigge and Shermis”? I came to […]
“Adventure ho!” reads the author’s inscription on the first page. Jonathan Auxier is a friend of a friend who lent me her signed copy of Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes for a read. Auxier wasn’t wrong. From the first page, Peter Nimble rollicks forward through adventure with barely a missed beat along the way. Peter Nimble is an orphan, […]
As I listened to The Hobbit on CD today on my drive, I was struck by Tolkien’s comments about Bilbo just before the hobbit sees Smaug for the first time. “Wisps of vapour floated up and past him and he began to sweat. A sound, too, began to throb in his ears, a sort of bubbling like the noise of a […]
I first met him in the Oxford Valley Barnes and Noble on a rainy afternoon about eleven years ago. I’d heard he would be a bad influence on me, but I wanted to draw my own conclusions before entering the debate. And time was running short: a discussion about his worth was planned for the next day. It was a […]
There are some books that I always have in the back of my mind when I’m in used book stores or wandering the wide web. They’re often the ones from childhood which are just so worn (after all, even if they were just given to my sisters and not passed down from our mom, they’d been through nearly 10 years […]