Welcome back! Thank you all for the batch cooking suggestions from last week. We plan to do a freezer clean-out soon to take inventory and free up some space. Things are also cooling off in New England, so it’s getting ready to be soup season anyway. I always anticipate my first batch of slow cooker […]
Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the […]
The closing dispatch of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck sends a lieutenant up a hill on an Italian island in December 1943 carrying a white flag, and his white flag is a bath towel. There are forty-three American paratroopers behind him and eighty-seven heavily armed Germans dug in ahead. He has memorised […]
The trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew has arrived. Greta Gerwig’s highly-anticipated Netflix film premieres in theaters on February 12, and the trailer reveals more than we’ve seen yet of her spin on the first story in the Narnia chronology. Watch it here: Here are my first impressions: “Stairway to Heaven”? Tell me it’s rock […]
A Tempest of Desire A Tempest of Desire by Lorraine Heath is $2.99! This released December 2024 and we’ve heard good things about the crazysauce plot. Did any of you pick this one up? New York Times bestselling author Lorraine Heath returns to the fan favorite series, The Scandalous Gentlemen of St. James, with the story of […]
Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept. They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of […]
A woman gets on a bus in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and is asked her name. She glances at a cigarette advertisement on the wall and then out of the window at a tree, and says she is Camille Oaks. She also tells everyone she is a dental nurse, which she is not. […]
When it comes to holiday months, I get excited to see which book clubs select “on theme” and who isn’t guided by the calendar. Are there spooky books selected for October? Yes! But if you aren’t looking for that kind of mood reading, there are also plenty of other excellent options to read, from an […]
A haunting, richly-textured supernatural thriller about violence as inheritance and the line between control and love The safest weapon in Joseph Stone’s The Haunted Women trilogy is literacy. For more than two centuries, the ghost of Daedrian Crow has haunted the women in Fran Tarantino’s bloodline, claiming them as his own. He watches them, sleeps […]
Before he sails, the boy in Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck is sent up a crag to speak with an old man who may or may not be Merlin. The verdict comes back in two parts, and both are insults dressed as prophecy. Greatness is coming to him, the old man says, precisely because […]