Author: Nadia Ghent

I finally got the chance to read Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. I’d had this book on my must-read list for almost a year, and I was determined to find the time to read it though. And I was not disappointed: this is a magisterial novel, full of the grand emotions and differing perceptions that

What kind of idiot gets salmonella poisoning on her long-awaited and much- anticipated first trip to Paris? Who disregards all the caveats of well-seasoned travelers and makes such a rookie mistake as to order not one but TWO soft-boiled eggs that came a few degrees above raw in a sweet Montmartre café, lop off the

Another book-sneaking-onto-my list- experience: my stepmother sent me Elaine Sciolino’s The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs to get me ready for my big trip (gasp! I’m leaving tomorrow!), and I had to read it. This is such an enjoyable read! Sciolino was the New York Times Paris bureau chief for

I couldn’t have picked a better book to  read after the privileged complaining of Little Labors than Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk. This is a memoir that succeeds at both demonstrating compassion for all living creatures, and also entering into the natural world that we so often take for granted, a world in which

I’m not exactly sure why I decided to read Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors. I’m many years away from being a new mother–I’m at the opposite end of motherhood–although thinking back to that time in my life is fraught with both terror and joy. I’ve admired Galchen’s writing, especially the fiction and non-fiction pieces she’s had

Does it count as part of the challenge if I haven’t read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in about….a really long time?? Let’s just say that it was in another century and millennium that I’d first read this memoir of Hemingway’s early Paris years, and since I’m going to Paris myself for the first time in

I started the Summer Reading Challenge with a book I was extremely eager to read: The Girls, by Emma Cline.  This novel has been getting a huge amount of press, and rightly so, even if many of the reviewers have sounded as if they’d been eating sour grapes. Cline’s writing is breathtaking, and the story

Happy Summer! I’m about to retreat to the shade of the magnolia tree in my back yard and get some reading done, as long as my sweet dog Milo is willing to let me off the hook for endless Frisbee duty. He doesn’t understand why anyone would want to sit in one place for hours

Even though I got a flu shot back in November, I still somehow came down with a nasty virus of some sort–muscles that ache as if I just ran back-to-back ultra marathons, and a head alternately pounding and spinning–so I spent most of the day recovering (the first time in years that I have actually

Ok well, 6th and almost 7th books.  You can see from the bookmark on the right in Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit that I am not quite done–only about 30 pages to go, and since it is way too cold and snowy to do anything outside today (-2, 6 more inches of