Author: Teri Rife

I finished this novel by the poet, Ocean Vuong, yesterday evening. It’s styled as a communication addressed to the narrator’s mother, and the reader can rely on the pronoun “you” as referring to her, a woman born in Vietnam during the war. This is not solely a mother/son story, however. Other personal relationships of the

I have been listening to this book in my car. Yesterday’s trip to Fort Worth (to see the Kimbell Museum’s exhibition of Monet’s late work) brought me to the end of Circe. As a student of Latin in junior and senior high school, and someone who took “Greek and Roman Mythology” as an elective in

This is a delightful children’s book about elements of art:  line, shape and color.  There is a tour at the Meadows Museum called, “Learning to Look,” for Grades 1-5.  Identifying basic elements of art is part of it, so when I saw this book in Brainpickings, I checked it out of the library.  It’s so

I have read an Ocean Vuong poem or two prior to this, and have read about Ocean Vuong himself in The New Yorker. He was born in Saigon, lives in NYC, and is 31 years old, having written this, his first full-length collection of poems, in 2016. I’m pleased to report that I had to

The docents at the art museum have a book club in the summers when touring activity is light.  Today we discussed this book which was in progress when the author died.  Since her hope had been to see it finished and published a close friend pulled it together and made sure that happened.  (When I

I listened to this twelve-CD novel in my car.  I’ve just noticed on the cover that Mark Helprin is the “#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Winter’s Tale.”  How weird is that, me having just finished Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale? I probably put this one on my list based on

In a previous season of our reading together, I have written about the work of Jeanette Winterson.  I was attracted to this book not only because she wrote it, but also because it is Shakespeare’s play, “A Winter’s Tale,” re-imagined as a 267 page novel.  I first saw the play sometime during the past decade

I saw the National Theatre Live productions of Millennium Approaches and Perestroika in a local cinema (last year, I think).  I had seen them done by Dallas theater groups in years past, but the NTL was something else again.  The cast, the sets! What does this have to do with Summer Reading?  The National Theatre