image found here Robert took off his round wire-rimmed glasses and his shoes. He climbed into the bed, careful not to disturb Elspeth, and folded himself around her. For weeks she had burned with fever, but now her temperature was almost normal. He felt his skin warm slightly where it touched hers. She had passed into the realm of inanimate objects and was losing her own heat. Robert pressed his face into the back of Elspeth’s neck and breathed deeply. Elspeth watched him from the ceiling. How familiar he was to her, and how strange he seemed. She saw, but could not feel, his long hands pressed into her waist…

Mona Simpson’s newest novel, My Hollywood, explores the relationship between upper-middle class and wealthy women in Santa Monica, and the women they hire to care for their children. Claire is a composer from New York, who moves to Santa Monica with her husband and baby so that her husband, Paul, can pursue his dream of writing TV sit-coms.  She is successful enough, in that she is offered commissions, and receives a Guggenheim fellowship, and travels to New York to see a piece she has written performed.  However, they are not wealthy by Santa Monica standards, they rent their home, and she doesn’t quite understand the money of the people around…

Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that comes from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts.  Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them.  Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it.  I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread.   These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the…

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off from her job writing for the Baltimore Sun to travel around Europe in search of the self she remembers, not defined by a husband, her kids, or her career.  She is hoping that by taking an entire year to travel, she can learn to slow down, to take one day at a time, without schedules or defined goals. There is something about taking your time in each city, perhaps focusing on your neighborhood and its rhythms, that is completely different than the type of rush in, see it all, rush out type of travel that most of us can afford.  I’ve…

I’ve been a fan of Dick Francis since being introduced to his work in 1987. I was at a friend’s house, and I was saying that I like horses, and horse racing, and her mom suggested that I might really enjoy his books. Normally I’m not a big fan of mysteries, but I was sucked in from the start. That first book was Break-In, after which I had to read Bolt, which had the same characters. Luckily, Francis had been writing for years, so I had a large library to go back and read. Francis and his wife were a team. Their mysteries did most often center around the world…

I’ve joined the throngs and read the Millennium Trilogy, by Stieg Larsson, otherwise known as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo“, “The Girl Who Played With Fire“, and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest“. From the publisher, quick blurbs. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pieced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and…

Commenter CJ stopped by the other day and said that she had found an old mutual bloggy friend of ours, Wendy, who is blogging again, which I had not known, and was glad to find.  Then my friend Theresa from My Fairbanks Life stopped by, and it looks like she’s blogging again. Yay to both! I gotta get motivated and back into it myself. Soon. After I fix my sidebar, I guess, and fill it in with all of your blogs again. In CJ’s comment, she said she liked my book reviews, so in her honor, here’s my review of my most recent read, The Lost Dog, by Michelle de…

In an alternate reality Europe, the early 1900s are filled with two very different cultures; the Clankers, and the Darwinists. The Clankers have built amazing machines that can walk and fly and even run. They distrust the Darwinist mightily, and feel that they have made some ungodly discoveries. The Darwinists have taken the discoveries of Darwin, (alternate reality Darwin has discovered DNA, and how to manipulate it), and have created living beasts that serve as machines. A whale that flies, like a giant dirigible, but one in which the passengers ride inside of, rather than beneath. It is 1914, and Aleksandar is the prince of Austria. When his parents are…

I have a secret. And everyone knows it. But no one talks about it, at least not out in the open. That makes it a very modern secret, like knowing your favorite celebrity has some weird eccentricity or other, or professional athletes do it for the money, or politicians don’t actually have your best interests at heart. Sprout is the story of Daniel Bradford, a kid who decides that if he can’t fit in, it will at least be on his own terms. He’s a gifted writer, something that his English teacher figures out pretty quickly and moves to hone in time for the state essay-writing contest. The teen years…

KarenMEG recommended The Help over on her blog, so I thought I’d put it on hold at the library. I did, but then I found out I was number 258 in line for it, and decided that maybe I’d buy it myself. So the next time we were at the bookstore, I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it in the fiction area. I asked the helpful person behind the information desk, and he said they should have it, they had 5 copies an hour earlier, but it was downstairs on the ‘Best Sellers’ shelf. Down we went, where he scooped up the very last copy and handed it…

For the first time ever I hoped there was no Baby Rachel.  I don’t know what happened to Dad and Lisa, if the baby was ever born.  It must be so hard now to have a baby.  Lisa could have miscarried or had a stillborn baby.  Horrible though that is, it might be for the better. I tiptoed out of the sunroom and through the kitchen to the bathroom.  It smells of fish and bedpans and ocean breeze air freshener.  I curled up on the cold tile floor, and I rocked back and forth, glad it made my body ache even more, like I deserved the punishment for what I’d…