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Reading with My Ears
My sister Mary recently told me about listening to Snow Falling on Cedars with her 14 year old son. He needed to finish an abundance of school assigned reading and had fallen behind, so she checked...
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Bookmares
How I feel about choosing my next read. Lately, I’ve felt traumatized by books. Two of the books I was able to stop reading when they upset me. I didn’t care enough about the characters to make myself...
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Our Brains May be Shorting out on Skimming
As I painted my son’s ceilings over spring break, I listened to the the radio streaming from my computer in the next room. A piece came on about our brains and the effects of skimming material while...
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Creative Beginnings: Part One
This month I’d like to start a series on creative beginnings. It’s not very original. January is a time for beginning a new year and resolutions and what not. But I am taking the excuse of a new...
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Wednesday Wonders: When to Call the Book Done
The other day my son said, “You know you’ve got a LOT of books on writing on your bookshelf. Have you read all of those?” Mostly, I told him. (He wasn’t particularly impressed — just astounded that I...
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Wednesday Wonders: How to Get Rewards for Reading
Every summer about this time, I remember the libraries have programs for reading with prizes to encourage reading. My mom tells me I began doing this in the card catalog days of my grade school years,...
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Wednesday Wonders: The Garden Gift of Forty
When I was a teenager, working in the garden numbed my brain with boredom. I could not understand how my mother spent hours and days pulling weeds and clipping dead branches. I loved the beauty of the...
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Wednesday Wonders on a Thursday: Two Books With True Endings
If you want to find a good read, go to a writing conference. Writers, I have learned, are jittery about their own books. As often as not, we struggle to tell you what our books are about or why we...
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