The only podcast I listen to with eager dedication is Writing Excuses. Hosted by a merry band of mostly science fiction and fantasy authors with frequent guest authors, their craftsmanship and tutelage also includes book-of-the-week reading recommendations. Author Mary Robinette-Kowal challenged herself for a year to only read non-American authors. Her co-host, author Dan Wells …
Are you an American* watching fútbol in Mexico? Wishing you were watching football instead? Perhaps procuring a little bit of Spanish slang will help you experience some of the excitement that defines this sport worldwide. It’s easy! You don’t have to lie to your wife and fly to a match in another country in order …
Apparently Dan Brown is the Elizabeth Gilbert of grocery-store thrillers. Too easy, vapid and pandering. Or worse. Based on the overwhelmingly condescending and high-brow dismissiveness his books might as well be 50 Shades of Simple Mysteries. Twilight for adults who romanticize European art and architecture, historical mystery and political-ish intrigue. Book lovers and literary snobs …
Some 20 years after I was bowled over by this sweeping saga at the historic McDonald Theatre in my hometown, I stumbled across the novel in one of my favorite second-hand stores. We had read much of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler in a college poetry workshop but for some inexcusable reason I had never …
Despite varied invitations, shall we say, there are only three sets of circumstances where I would get into a car with a male stranger at night. I am horribly injured and my death is imminent if I don’t take the risk that you will actually drive me to the hospital You’re Billy Ocean and I’m …
There is too thin a line between Ann Patchett and Ann Patchett’s heroine in State of Wonder. As the term “cultural appropriation” itself is increasingly (and distractingly) appropriated by the self-appointed justice crusaders that dilute the very equality they’re promulgating it can be a difficult topic to take seriously, one that is consistently marginalized by …
While our two-dimensional lives often encroach on the fullness of our three-dimensional real lives, they can also enhance them. And sometimes they even offer us the most serendipitous gifts of unexpected knowledge or experience. The internet is like many things in that its power and its value is in how you use it. And so …
There is no shortage of life-changing bestsellers to choose from when you’ve hit a crossroads in your life. Depending on who you are, what you believe and where you’re at in the maze of your life, one title might resonate more for you than others. The Power of Now might offer all the answers you …
Eleven years after Eat, Pray, Love was published I slinked out of the public library with it hidden in my grocery tote, overstuffed with art and architecture DVDs and a hefty compendium of the Museé d’Orsay. Respectable rentals in case a wayward barcode didn’t get scanned and the alarm went off again when I left. …