A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (published by W.W. Norton Co. in 2015) is at once witty and outrageously bright. Norris stirs professional and personal memoir in with grammatical how-to and literary trivia.
While my husband scours the Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks for the islands and my first grade daughter eagerly listens to geographical and historical information set out in the Hawaii: The Aloha State book (one of a set of the fifty states) she found in the children’s section of our library, I opt for more literary preparation: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, The Story of Hawaii by Hawaii’s Queen, Jack London’s Hawaii stories and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
Alison Walsh’s 2018 literary cookbook, A Literary Tea Party: Blends and Treats for Alice, Bilbo, Dorothy, Jo, and Book Lovers Everywhere, is one of the best books I stumbled upon at my public library last year. Published by Skyhorse Publishing, Walsh’s book combines beautiful pictures with easy-to-follow recipes inspired by some of my favorite stories.
This is a beautiful re-weaving of Circe’s stories, in which Miller expertly adorns the many classical tales with plenty of her own invention.
