Do you like to read books? I love them. How about movies? Reviews have been the bread and butter of this site since the beginning. Before I made this blog a personal journal space during COVID, I used it to write reviews for such books as Tara Westover’s Educated and Ruth Wariner’s The Sound of Gravel.
Stories are the *best* place to lose yourself. When I was still in grade school, I went with the Boxcar Children and The Black Stallion and Pippi Longstocking to wonderful places I could never go without reading.
Later, when I went to college, I meant to study computer science, because that was considered a smart field. But I loved books still. Literature carried me. English became my field, and we read books and wrote about them and I loved every second.
I discovered that writing about books could be something to share with others. While I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time writing about feelings, experiences, ideas … I always do a few book reviews.
I think of my fellow readers when I write about books and movies. How will *they* respond to these stories? What will they understand when they come to know these books?
I spend a lot of time reading on the web these days, about SEO and blogging and teaching. But no time I spend reading on the web can compare with reading real books. There’s something about the paper page. How it sounds when you turn it. Propping a book up to read while you’re eating. Marking a phrase to remember.
Are you transported by stories too? I hope you’ll consider a comment on the reviews pages if something strikes you as interesting. Reading takes you places, yes indeed. I hope you will enjoy these reviews and perhaps follow me in the journeys I took with these texts.
I am in mourning because yesterday I finished Hell Bent, a book I was totally taken up with, totally lost in the author’s tale. And now it’s over, I can never visit that world for the first time again. Benjamin Lorr was at one time, if you like, a Bikram Kool-Aid drinker, who went to […]
Finishing Benjamin Lorr’s Hell-Bent, a Yoga Memoir Read More »
I have been reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed and have found in her a fellow-traveler in more ways than one. Not just someone who felt she had to go somewhere for spiritual exercise — in her case, a 1000-mile trek by herself on foot alone along the spine of the Sierras — but someone who
Going it Alone: Wild by Cheryl Strayed Read More »
