Category: Winter Reading 2018

“I’d like to stop having to explain whether or not each new feathered dinosaur specimen we discover was a bird.”  Don’t we all, Julia Clarke. Don’t we all. What Julia is actually getting at is that, as an archeologist, she’s tired of getting pushed against a wall of explaining new discoveries in terms of old

“To the very young, to school teachers and also to those who compile textbooks about constitutional history, politics, and current affairs, the world is a more or less rational place…To those, on the other hand, with any experience of affairs, these assumptions are merely ludicrous.” pvii. So begins one of my favourite passages of the

I’ve been reading Young Adult Fiction Author Brandon Sanderson’s work for some time now and while his writing is really unexeptional, the universe he builds and the concepts of deity and magic and human nature are compelling. If you can look past bad writing I would recommend most of his work. His books take place

Hi All, My name is Leslie and I am looking forward to this winter reading challenge. I meant to write my post last week and then read books instead! This winter I’ll be reading a combination of Young Adult Fantasy books and lots of gardening book pages and blogs hoping to brush up on “everything”

Finished reading this on Wednesday, Day 10.  81 pages of 109 read during the challenge.  Easy, LOL reading.  Roz Chast is a long-time cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine.  I love her style, the way she thinks, the way she prints (the book is entirely handwritten) and the way she draws.  This book began life

Finished reading this on Tuesday evening of Day 9.  295 pages of 440 read during the challenge.  It was so hard to close the book.  Clunk.  You know how it is when you don’t want to leave the world an author has created.  That was my experience with this one.  I lived there from 1888

I was about halfway through my Jodi Picoult novel at the start of the challenge, so I finished that book, and then went on to complete Hourglass by Dani Shapiro.  The books were similar in that they both explored family, parenthood, relationships and life stories, and I enjoyed them both very much.  They differed in

Well, as much as I tried to pace myself– I simply couldn’t help but spend the evening finishing this novel. I am glad I did. I was in no rush, and the last 107 pages kept me company on a quiet Monday. I won’t go into all the details but here are some of the

Dear readers, I am so much appreciating your posts.  It’s a wonderful thing to share books & lives, too. I’ve been concentrating on my Wendell Berry book, That Distant Land, which I was 145 pages into at the start of the challenge and at the end of yesterday reached Page 360.  So, whoo-hoo, 5 whole