This is the book of poetry that won Oliver the Pulitzer Prize and I can see why, tho so far I prefer her book Dream Work. Still, American Primitive has a lot of meatier subjects in it which I think gain more critical attention: there's a poem about her burial of a still-born kitten, a rather long poem about 2 different children some 100 years ago ( Read more... )

Love Saves the Day, by Gwen Cooper. Cooper is the same author who wrote "Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat", her memoir of life with the blind (in fact, eyeless) cat she adopted when it was an abandoned kitten. An excellent read, tho perhaps only for animal lovers -- I'm thinking ( Read more... )

I first read this book long ago (in high school, in fact) but I got an urge to read it again and I'm glad I did. I found I'd forgotten nearly the entire second half of the book, and the re-reading helped clarify some things for me about Buck's writing ( Read more... )

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"It's not about the sex", my ass: confessions of an ex-Mormon, ex-polygamist, ex-wife by Joanne Hanks, as told to Steve Cuno. I do so admire people who can not only correct their mistakes, but laugh about them afterwards. I cannot make either claim for myself ( Read more... )

The Motorcycle Diaries: notes on a Latin America journey, by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. This book reminded me vividly of what it was like to be in ones early 20s, that weird mix of brainless adolescent and responsible adult ( Read more... )

I loved this book, but I'm completely baffled as to how to describe it. The best I can do is to say that it's a time-traveling fantasy in 11 chapters, dealing with the lives of 6 characters, each of whom lives in a different time that can be anywhere from decades to centuries apart from the other characters ( Read more... )

This is an absolutely marvelous book, funny and charming from beginning to end. Like the book, The Big Year, it follows the adventures of three avid bird-watchers (birders, in the vernacular) as they spend a year chasing after birds they haven't yet seen. They do this as a group thru most of the book, tho there are occasional individual forays ( Read more... )

Just to clear things up right now, Charles Todd is a pen name for two people -- the actual Charles Todd, and his mother Caroline Todd. Together they've co-written two series of novels: The Inspector Ian Rutledge murder mysteries set in post-WWI England, and the Bessie Crawford stories about an English nurse serving in France during WWI.

A Test of ( Read more... )

In a fit of nostalgia, I read three collections of Ray Bradbury's short stories: The October Country, The Illustrated Man and Classic Stories 1 (selected from Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket ( Read more... )