Writing the good read
Since I asked last week for some ideas for good books for high school readers to donate to Treehouse, I’ve had a lot of comments from folks of my generation. And I find them astounding. Most of the books are adult literature or things that would be considered appropriate for middle grades now (read the…
It would be too easy for you to guess what I did. But how about this: guess how much I spent (it was actually less than I usually get away with when books are involved!)
I have a lot of friends who just don’t listen to me or follow rules well at all. When I invited people to my 50th birthday party, I specified no gifts, or gifts of books for the kids at Treehouse, a great organization that provides the little extras, as well as counseling and mentors to…
There are more than a hundred blogs participating in this year’s Freelance Success/WordCount Blogathon (for a full list, see this post). Every year I participate (this is my fourth), I make it a point to visit each participating blog at least once. Some of them sign up and don’t do much. Some are not to…
Tonight was my birthday party. About 40 people came to my house to hear live music by The Castaways who were as awesome on their ukuleles as most bands want to be on their bigger instruments. As they say, size doesn’t matter. They came to eat. The coconut cake from PCC was perhaps the biggest…
I turn 50 in nine days. Today, I got the card pictured below in the mail. I know other people who, on the verge of hitting the half century mark, also got their invitation to join AARP. I don’t know what database they bought to know that I am about to turn 50 — or…
I really should call this “words of the day” because there’s no way I can pick just one word from this week’s book, Horologicon by Mark Forsyth, proprietor of the InkyFool blog. I’ve said before I’m a word geek. Show me a book about words and their origins, or the evolution of language and I’ll…
I had some great English teachers in high school — women who challenged my thinking and my reading. They exposed me to authors I’d never have come to on my own (Heinrich Böll), and spurred me to dig deeper into the writing of authors who are part of almost every high school syllibus (the entire…
I remember hearing David Rakoff on This American Life and thinking he was David Sedaris, one of my favorite TAL contributors and authors, with a distinctive voice that makes everything he says funnier. I didn’t know he wrote books, too. But after he died of cancer at 47 last year, there was a lot of…
I didn’t have The Blue Book on my radar at all. But I read a review in the New York Times that talked about the author, AL Kennedy, as most closely akin to Richard Ford, whose book Canada I loved and wrote about previously. So I put it on my list. It sat on the…