Why There Should Have Been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
There was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded this year because none of the three finalists received a majority vote from the Pulitzer board. The judges who screened 300 or so books, narrowed the...
View ArticleFacing your heart of darkness, for love: State of Wonder
She was not terrified that the patient would die or she would lose the baby, she was terrified that she was doing something wrong in the eyes of Dr. Swenson. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is about a...
View ArticleTrain Dreams
Just steps from our front door, I can see the jagged peaks of Mount Index in amazing detail, lit up by the last rays of sun. The evening we arrived the mountaintop was hidden in fog. It’s spring and...
View ArticleI found enlightenment in the Pacific Northwest
In May, I happily stumbled on the secret to enlightenment when I attended the Medical Library Association (MLA) annual meeting in Seattle and vacationed with my family in the Cascades. It all started...
View ArticleA housekeeper, a professor, a boy, a baseball game
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses...
View ArticleFirst sentences, Junot Diaz
Selected first sentences, from short stories in This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz: “I’m not a bad guy.” “Nilda was my brother’s girlfriend. This is how all these stories begin.” “You, Yunior, have...
View ArticleBestsellers Tell What Possesses Us – Telegraph Avenue
This past fall and early winter there was a perfect storm of top authors publishing new books. I wanted to read a handful of them to see what possesses some of our best creative minds and our popular...
View ArticleHemingway on life and death, love and war
I believe that basically you write for two people: yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and...
View ArticleIf you want to be lifted up, read Kent Haruf
She looked at the two old brothers…. I want you to think about taking this girl in. They stared at her. You’re fooling, Harold said. No, Maggie said. I am not. They were dumbfounded. They looked at...
View ArticleBooks to read in 2014
Here’s my to-read list for 2014. It’s incomplete, always changing, and I’m sure I won’t get to all of these, not by a long shot, but it’s a convenient list when I’m choosing my next book. You may see a...
View ArticleWinners of the Literary Blog Hop Are…
Lynne Clark at Two Reads and Marie Stone are the Literary Blog Hop winners at Books Can Save a Life. Many thanks to Judith at Leeswammes for hosting this great event, and for all of you who stopped by...
View ArticleThe Underground Railroad
“She never got Royal to tell her about the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance...
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