*Catherine Cookson

I read her autobiography first: Our Kate, originally published in the late 60’s and reprinted 25 years later. It was an interesting memoir of a woman born illegitimately in 1906 to a working class family in Northern England, whose early life was coloured by strikes, illness, alcoholism, and most of all the stigma of being [...]

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* Piggie Update and Books

Children are doing well, bouncing off the walls because they feel healthy and have to stay home today. We’ll be having a couple more of same. We played 2 games of Clue, whereupon I bailed due to the extreme giddiness of said children and the poking of my bottom with a pen every time I [...]

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*For everyone who has to revise…again

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: it won the Pulitzer prize for 2007, today number 544 on Amazon more than a year after being published in paperback. That is the kind of success that authors crave. And how did it come? Fast, easy, cranking out book after book, as authors also crave?
Five years after [...]

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*1768–what’s changed?

From the 1768 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Stock brokers: “Are those who are employed to buy and sell shares in the joint stock of a company or corporation … as the practice of stock-jobbing has been carried on to such an excess as became not only ruinous to a great number of private families, but [...]

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*Thoughts on Ebooks

The positions for and against ebooks go something like this:
Ebooks are inevitable; new technology is here; get with the program or get left behind.
Ebooks can never have the feel of a book ; e-readers can be lost; you are at the mercy of giant e-providers who can cut you off or delete your library.
As a [...]

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*Books Lately

I am 3 or 4 books behind in my book reviews, but I just don’t have the energy for all that, what with reading and revising draft 8–call it 8A because it was just a quick tune-up as it happens, getting a new furnace, porch painting (not me unfortunately, not enough breath, but even hiring [...]

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*Vinyl Cafe

Most of my spare time is spent with my kids and so some things I used to do have gone by the wayside for a long time. While sick and in the stage of having no energy for anything, just well enough to be bored, I had time if nothing else. The kids were out [...]

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*Nothing But Ghosts

As you know, this has been a challenging summer for me: flu, bronchitis, pneumonia. And it was during this illness that I picked up Nothing But Ghosts by Beth Kephart. It was the perfect book to read right at that time: lovely, lyrical, kind.
Full review here.

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*Why I Write

I write for art, I write for my soul, and I write to make a living.
It took years of carving out time to write while earning a living through other means, years of intense frugality, until I could earn a living with writing. I was grateful when I could, and that humility and gratitude [...]

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*Elizabeth Strout’s Library

There is an enjoyable, though brief, interview with Elizabeth Strout on LibraryThing:
So many books and authors have inspired me, I almost don’t know where to start. Reading the work of Oscar Hijuelos opened up a new way of thinking for me; his work is large and gentle and vigorous and in a rhythm unlike [...]

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*Influential Books

I am now coughing with stops in between, but have a cat snoring and growling inside my upper chest. So I thought I would lose myself for a few moments in thinking about the books that have influenced me.
The first one is The Three Billy Goats Gruff because it is the first book I can [...]

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*Another Late Bloomer

Mama Bess picked up her pen in her sixties and wrote the first book of what would become a classic children’s series. That initial volume has sold sixty million copies and been translated into over thirty languages. That was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, later to be made into a [...]

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