Myrna CG Mibus - Idyllwild

I mentioned a book that I liked in a blog post  Read More - Here's my stack of books  (from January 2014). The book is The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry  by Rachel Joyce . I loved the book and have read it twice already so I was extremely pleased to hear that that author Rachel Joyce wrote a companion book to the Harold Fry book titled The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy . The book was due to be published in the UK last year but was not coming until February 2015 in the US. I didn't want to wait to read the new book - but I had no choice! I placed a request at my local library to be the first to read the book when it came out - and I waited impatiently for it to arrive. Well, I got the book from the Northfield Public Library a few weeks ago and read it right away. I loved it! The story is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Fry book. Rather, Quennie's story parallels what is going on in Fry's story. A person can read the Queenie book without having read...

My copy of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens - just £1.99! I've been super busy lately helping out with a Northfield Arts Guild production of August: Osage County as well as getting my daughter, Rose, to and from rehearsals and performances of Northfield High School's Rock 'n' Roll Revival XI. To top things off, I decided to audition for the upcoming NAG production of the musical Oliver! Well, I got in the show and I'm really excited that I'll be playing Widow Corney. We've already started rehearsals and things are going well. Just for fun, I decided to pull out my copy of Oliver Twist and start reading through the Dickens story that inspired the musical. I found my paperback copy of Oliver Twist that I purchased when I was in England for a January Term class through University of St. Thomas back in 1996. That visit was life-changing! (click HERE to read my previous post about my host parent, Bob). When I opened Oliver Twist , I found inside a Britis...

Bit by bit, I'm getting my new office organized. It's a slow process but I'm making progress. Tonight I got my memoir collection on the shelves organized by author. I know I have more books floating around the house to fit in here and I still have space for them. That is good. I'm thinking I will put my writing books on the bottom shelf of my bookshelf. I expect the bookshelf will be full very soon.  Memoir collection - or most of it. I'm sure there's more floating around the house. Also in progress is bookshelf organization in the rest of the house. Our fiction, science fiction and non-fiction, poetry and drama collections are going on shelves in the upstairs hallway. The aviation and religion books are going on shelves downstairs. There are books on other shelves in the house, too, that feel like they need their own space: horse books, Border Terrier books, James Herriot books, Harry Potter books, the Guardians of Ga'hoole collection, Laura...

Some rain is mixed in with our sunny weather during our spring break Staycation - but no worries!  Rainy times are certainly good times to read and the much needed moisture sure has turned our grass green! I'm happy to report that I did in fact sit still one afternoon and I finished reading a book, Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton and I've been reading a bit each day. Here's the rundown on the stack of books I'm reading right now... First here's a picture of the books that I'm reading. I like having a visual reference and you might, too. From the top: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef,  a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton: I started this book a week ago and finished it up on Monday afternoon. On the surface it's a book about Gabrielle and how she became the owner and chef of famous New York restaurant, Prune, but it's also a book about family and marriage. The last sentence in the book left me si...

The kids are now on spring break. While many of our friends are driving somewhere or jetting off to great vacation destinations we are having a staycation and sticking around home. We have summer-like weather here with temperatures in the 70s and couldn't possibly have nicer weather for a week spent around home. One of my goals for this staycation is to read. And by read I mean really read, like in a comfortable chair or on the couch...not in the bathroom like I usually do which, though a fine enough place to read a page or two, is not the ideal location to relax while reading a book. Though generally no one bothers you if you are reading in the bathroom... When I was a kid I spent hours sitting on the couch reading books. So did Owen. I'm glad to see that my kids are as hooked on reading as we were as kids. Both Rose and Ryan read a ton. We just got a few new books from our local bookstore,  Monkey See, Monkey Read , and from the library just to get enough reading materia...