What I read It’s hard to believe I first read Anne Tyler thirty years ago. I was a different woman then. Tyler’s characters are finely drawn and I feel as if I know them–maybe not in this world, but in some other reality, perhaps. Her families are made up of people as different from each …
For weeks I’ve waited to post about my visit to Canyon Ranch in April because processing my visit was like trying to fit a square peg into the round hole of my experience. I had nothing with which to compare it. When I was gifted a spa package several years ago, the day consisted of …
What I read Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport are on their way up. College educated young professionals in Atlanta they are confident and accomplished–Roy, in the business world; Celestial in the arts. Theirs would be a good life, stepping from one rung on the ladder of success to the next. Their marriage isn’t perfect: there …
What I read Alice McDermott is one of my favorite writers. I haven’t read all her work, but That Night and Charming Billy are books that have stayed with me. McDermott’s characters are finely drawn and her sense of what it is to be human is spot on. The Ninth Hour is no exception. It’s …
My earliest memories are of tree canopy and the smell of fresh cut grass, of singing sand and lapping waves and drizzly Sunday afternoons. I’ve never known a life that isn’t saturated with green, that wasn’t waterlogged. My world, clothed in beauty–what I see when I hear the words, “And God saw everything she made, …
What I read I’ve been glancing over Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk for over a year now. The book’s cover showed up in New Yorker ads for a time and on my Amazon “Customers who bought this also bought” feed and on the digital galley platform to which I belong. I’ve passed it on the …
Once Upon a RiverDiane SetterfieldSimon & Schuster (December 2018) It was a dark winter night. The solstice, to be exact. A man, face battered and bloodied, bursts in the door of the Swan Inn holding a small limp body. He collapses. When the village nurse Rita Sunday arrives to care for the man, she first …
The Half BrotherHolly LeCrawDoubleday (2015) Holly LeCraw’s novel The Half Brother is one of those family-with-a-secret-sagas and a story of forbidden love. And then it becomes something more. Charlie Garrett is the son of a single mother. The father he never knew died, ostensibly, in Vietnam. Then his mother married the wealthy Hugh Satterthwaite when he was …
Educated: a memoirTara WestoverRandom House (2018) I used to try to get my high school students (at least once a year and usually when reading Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) to think about the difference between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’. Most seemed to think that they were receiving an education in their daily classes. My contention was that they …
Virgil Wander Leif Enger Grove Atlantic Press (October 2018) Virgil Wander (yes, that’s the main character’s name) thinks his “world began reorganizing itself” the day a stranger, Rune Eliassen, turned up in town–but I’m pretty sure the sea change in Virgil’s life really began when he found himself launched off Highway 61 on a snowy autumn …
This is my symphony 