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fantasy

Summer Reading: Why Fantasy Novels Should be on Your Reading List

But real life doesn’t always give us the The Lord of the Rings’ clear differentiation between good and evil. While Frodo had the support of many brave companions, we are often faced with people who, though they may be bosses, friends, or even family, might contradict what we know is right. But here, too, fantasy can provide relatable heroes who teach us and encourage us to stand up for justice, no matter what those around us say.

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October 18, 2017 No Comments
A Passionate Year of Reading

Summer Reading: Conversation of a Lifetime

But what I finally sit down with almost always comes down to something else. Not that I necessarily know what that something else is—the book just calls to me. I answer in hope of a deep conversation.

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October 5, 2017 No Comments
Alice James Books

Summer Reading: Poetry as Antidote to Apathy

I am tired of violence. I am tired of lies and hateful rhetoric. I am tired, but it’s not time to go to sleep. It is time to wake up. These three poetry collections are the antithesis of lazy summer reading. These books shun complacency. These are books to stay awake by.

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September 28, 2017 No Comments
Forest Service

Summer Reading: Water I Gladly Drank

Berry’s poem distilled the meaning of those four summers into the clarity of spring water cupped in my hand, and elicited poignancy like the hotspots my palm had sensed hovering over ash.

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August 30, 2017 1 Comment
21st century horror

Summer Reading: Spending Summer Scared

Is there a place for such stories–or even their subversion–when our politics are unpredictable, people live in fear of being scapegoated and harassed, and it seems the threat of a new war is around every corner? 

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July 31, 2017 No Comments
Anne Patchett

Summer Reading: It’s All About the Setting

For some reason, the books that stand out to me most carry along with them the memory not only of the plot, the characters, and the language, but the setting where I read them.  Middlemarch is the name of the fictional town where the story takes place, and while I loved the setting – pre-Industrial Revolution, old English estates, country churches – it seems pertinent that I read it in a quiet place where the reaches of the sky and the ocean reflected the vastness of Eliot’s insights. 

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July 20, 2017 1 Comment
books

Summer Reading: Delights of Defiance

There is a joy, too, in reading as adults, in the summer, at leisure. It is a luxury we rarely allow ourselves, sometimes only on planes or on vacation. But do you remember that stealthy act of reading, under the bed-tent, late at night, in the dark?

Sometimes our world goes dark, and we need reading more than ever. Sometimes reading is our deliverance.

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June 28, 2017 1 Comment
books

Summer Reading: Daughter of Time II

I measured the physical reality of my summer by the weeks in a non-weight bearing cast, the weeks in a boot with limited weight bearing, and my slowly increasing ability to move. My mental reality I measured by reading, most of which I had not expected to come my way. While I might have chosen mysteries anyway, now they were distractions of another kind.

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June 12, 2017 No Comments

Comfort Reads

by Amy Rice com·fort food noun food that provides consolation or a feeling of well-being, typically any with a high sugar or other carbohydrate content

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September 3, 2015 No Comments

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