Author: Teri Rife

First, my thanks to JNaz for calling the author Brian Doyle, and specifically the book Mink River to my attention.  What a glorious ride for 319 pages without once a letdown.  Prose poetry in the form of a novel.  Yes, as JNaz mentioned, Doyle is sparse on punctuation and fulsome on adjectives and lists, but

Henry Marsh is a doctor who writes interesting “Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery” (that’s the subtitle of this book).  I’ve always been interested in medicine, so I lap up books like this one.  I’m a fan of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, for instance.  While it’s terrifying to know so much about what

I read this book because I saw a recommendation from a favorite author of mine, George Saunders.  This is Adjei-Brenyah’s first book.  His dedication is:  “For my mom, who said, ‘How can you be bored?  How many books have you written?’” These stories take on some of the big issues:  violence in our society based

I haven’t written anything about my reading for too long, and since I’m still not ready I thought I’d just tell you about that!  My reading pattern during this winter period has been atypical.  I’ve been interweaving books since the start, mostly because of library due dates that cannot be extended. I was listening to

I read this book because I heard the author on BBC Radio 3 during a program with a title something like “Insomnia and Writing.”  I liked the way Benjamin expressed her thoughts on the subject, so when her book was mentioned I made a note to look for it at the library.  There it was

I finished listening to this book yesterday.  Must get it back to the library quickly because there is a queue of people waiting for it, as I waited for it before them. This book is nominally about the devastating fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986, on the same day as the Chernobyl

St. Clair gives the reader 281 pages of surprising information about a palette-full of colors:  their discovery and manufacture, their rise, and sometimes fall from favor.  The book is organized in sections by color category, with various shades of each category examined in some detail:  from Lead White all the way through to Pitch Black,

This novel is set in London, with the plot unspooling in the period leading up to England’s involvement in World War II, and after the war.  Juliet Armstrong, the main character, is hired by MI5, before the age of twenty, as a typist of transcriptions of meetings with Fascist sympathizers, secretly recorded.  So, there is

This 122-page book on the subject of reading and writing poetry, one could say, enacts its subject matter.  Not a word is wasted.  It trusts that the reader has come to the text with an open heart and a desire to engage fully.  It was written in 1994, so I’m late in reading it.  But

Where does the time go when it flies away?  Don’t know, but it’s good to gather here. I’m too lazy this year to plan, make a stack of my books and photograph them, so I’ll just list (a few pages into some of these & almost through Gilbert’s book):  What’s Lying Around the House (Off