Category: Summer Reading 2019

I found this book, Shipwrecks on Cape Cod by Isaac Small, in the same little library in Maywood, NJ where I found The Light Princess. In fact, I loved both these finds so much I was talking about it with one of my dad’s office assistants, Coreen, and she said “you must be my daughter from another dimension- I put

I found this book on the advanced reader shelf in the basement of the library. This is a treasure trove for us volunteers, since advanced readers come in continuously to the library and cannot be sold, and must be given away. We try to give out these advanced readers when we table at the Farmer’s

I have been given a number of Okawa books by an enthusiast and this might be my last one for a little while. Though I did have quite an experience outside Penn Station that makes me wonder… I was waiting for my train outside Penn Station at around 8:30am on Thursday. I was quite literally

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

I am off to a crazy late start to the summer reading challenge.  Absorbed by family matters (parent care-giving), my mind has not been capable of being still long enough to read much of anything.  But, for some reason, this little book by Susan Howe kept nagging at me to sit down.  This is not

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

This book came to me by way of the same patient who gave me A Spiritual Interview with George Washington. It is written by the same Japanese millionaire author. This book was interesting to read because there were elements of it that I completely agreed with, but I also absolutely felt that there were subtleties within the

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 discovered Rachel Held Evans when I read about her tragic death earlier this year.  A young woman in her thirties, happily married, and mother of two small children, she died suddenly from an allergic reaction to a medication she was given for an infection.  In her short life, she published a very popular blog