This book is many things, but mostly it is a celebration of storytelling. It is Brian Doyle’s imagining of the tale Robert Louis Stevenson might have written about a brief period he spent in San Francisco while waiting for his beloved Fanny. Rooming at the house of John and Mary Carson he tells a warm
The Book of The Damned was found in the garbage at the library – was headed for the dump! So glad I rescued this strange book from 1919 – it is about data that science has disregarded and moved on from. The book is a long report of all kinds of weird scientific observations
This is another book that my son chose for me. I am not sure if he goes by the covers, reads the back of the books, or if it is just plain intuition, but he always finds something that carries a message that I need to hear. And, in this book, hearing is basically the
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
This book has been on my shelf forever. I don’t remember when I bought it or why. The pages of the paperback are yellowed with age. I’m so glad I finally picked it up and decided to read it. The book is a series of interrelated stories set in the 1950’s. The stories take place
This beautiful little book, first published in 1814, reprinted by Smithsonian Books in 2018, is a wonder. Based on the work of Abraham Gottlob Werner, it is a book to be explored, more than read. It was designed to provide standardized descriptions and representations of color to be used across the arts and sciences. Honestly,
My neighbor, Dave, gave me the copy of Immigrant Voices on New Year’s Day when we went to visit a friend in Sonoma. He had read “No Subject” by Carolina De Robertis to me the last time we drove out thatta way. I re-read that this week, and read “Home Safe” by Emma Ruby-Sachs. “No Subject” is
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
Seasonal Reading 