Move over Indiana Jones…

Our Reader’s Advisory Roundtable just finished our non-fiction genre. Our benchmark was The Devil in the White City. I was happy to read it, because I know so many people have really enjoyed this book. I am a little perplexed by that, though. It is a well-written and researched book and I loved learning about [...]

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Serendipity ~ Milton, Dante & Oscar Wilde

Last week at work, I was filling some of our displays at the library and as usual I got a little sidetracked looking at the books. You’d think I’d be jaded by now, but no. I can’t remember what book I was looking at, but I remembered that Meljean Brook wrote the first in her [...]

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David Grossman ~ Writing in the Dark

A while back a friend of mine recommended David Grossman’s book Someone to Run With. It was also made into a movie. I haven’t had a chance to pick up any of his novels, but I have started reading his book of essays called Writing in the Dark. Last night I read his essay with [...]

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Traveling with Toddlers

We just got back from visiting family and I couldn’t help but think of this book while we were on our excursion. It seemed as though the folks in the hospitality industry are not acquainted with travelers with young children. As my husband was carrying the car seat (ok, it was in a bag) the [...]

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Toddler Fun

Because of Jeanne’s comment on my last post, I wanted to talk more about some of the activity books that I’ve piled up over the past couple of weeks. I meant to post this last week, but the daycare cold caught up with us and I didn’t manage to do it. Anyway. Here are some [...]

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reading notes

I’ve just finished Shipwrecked the children’s book about the first Japanese person to come to America. This was a fascinating story and as it was a children’s book, it was just the right amount of information I wanted to read on the topic. Very well done, too. Manjiro is a young Japanese fisherman, who is [...]

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Reading notes

I’m well on my way with Moby Dick. I’ve decided that I’m just going to put almost everything aside for the moment and try and finish that up. I’m doing well. I’ve also been reading The Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. I feel like I agree with most of what he’s written [...]

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Green Things

Oh how Spring has sprung. When I got up this morning, I could smell the lilacs from my kitchen table throughout the entire first floor of my house. Lilacs are one of my all time favorite smells and one of the best things about my childhood home. We lived next to a sheet metal factory, [...]

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Reading Notes

I’m just finishing up Apples Are From Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins. Robbins told President Nazarbayev that he wanted to write a book about Kazakhstan that will be read for years to come and although he was only trying to impress the President, I think he might have accomplished that goal. It’s true that I was [...]

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Traveling with Toddlers and Apples

I have been away from the internet for a while, which can be a good thing and a bad thing, but we took our first trip as a family (dog included) to my in-laws over the weekend. Based on past long-trips with our son in which a 3 hour trip turned into 5 or when [...]

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