OK, here I am…I just finished the last of the 5 books for my From the Stacks Winter Reading Challenge. I had saved Julie and Julia for last, figuring it would be a light, fun, breezy read, which might suit me well after some of the heavier topics I had thus far covered. I was right. To be honest, I knew very little about this book/blog/idea before the book was given to me as a gift last Christmas. I knew that the author, Julie Powell, lived in New York, that she decided to make every recipe in Julia Childs’ famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking, 524 recipes, in…

Last night, I finished the 4th book in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, Year of Wonders. This is the tale of an English village beset by Plague in 1665-1666. The protagonist of the story is a young widow, Anna. Anna’s husband was an Iron miner, and died in a mining accident, leaving her to support and care for her two young children. In addition to working as a servant at the rectory, she takes in a boarder to supplement her income. Her boarder is a tailor, and they get along very well. He enjoys her children, and brings laughter back into the home. There is the start of a romance,…

Sunday night, after Ted and Maya had gone to bed, I was considering watching a DVD, perhaps Out of Africa. But then I decided that I didn’t want to stay up that long (it’s a long movie, and it was already 9:00), and that I was enjoying my book, so I would read instead. I made the right choice. 🙂 I read the concluding chapters to book three in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, The Jump-Off Creek, by Molly Gloss. This is a book by a local Portland author, which I picked up while we were in Oregon this summer. I read maybe a chapter of it then, and then…

“What do parents look like?” “You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.” I recently finished the second book in the From the Stacks reading challenge. The book was My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The premise is this: A young girl, Kate, is terribly ill. She has leukemia, and the only thing that can save her, maybe, is donated umbilical cord blood. So, her parents have another child, Anna, a child that they select from several embryos because she…

I’ve finished the first book of my reading challenge. One of my New Year’s resolutions a year or two ago was to go back and read some of the ‘classics’ that I missed in high school and college. One such book was The Scarlet Letter. Reading books written 150 years ago requires me to slow down, to concentrate. I liken it to reading a book in a second language; a language of which I am familiar & fluent, yet it is not my first language, so I have to stop and consider the meanings of the various words and phrases. The style of the writing is such that I could…

Lotus Reads found a great reading challenge that might finally get some of those books on my sidebar out of the way, making room for some new ones. This sounds like a really good idea to me, so I’m in. Here’s the premise, from the woman with the great idea, Michelle at overdue books: “If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven’t read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked…