Dear Reacher, I’m sure I’ve told you before, but, dang it Reacher, you’re adorable. Some people think that men who are 6’5” tall and built like refrigerators don’t want to be called adorable (or cute, as I often remark during college football games), but I mean it most sincerely. And let’s face it – I’m… View more
The question we get asked most often the week before Halloween is, “Do you have any scary movies?” Oh yes, my friend, we most certainly do. We have your standard scary movie fare – the Friday the 13th series, the Halloween movies, the Scream tetralogy. All excellent choices. But we’ve dug a little deeper into… View more
Yes, yes, I’m a big boring fan of feminist literature. There’s a part of me that could have been a gender studies major in college, but I wasn’t, I was an English major who got way into Virginia Woolf. It surprised me too. On the canon of what to read when it comes to women’s… View more
I have always loved mysteries, especially series mysteries. You can get to know and like a character even if they sometimes frustrate you with their obtuseness or naiveté. Such is not the case with Dorothy Martin in The Gentle Art of Murder by Jeanne M. Dams. Dorothy is an older woman, a retired teacher married… View more
It is with the utmost excitement that I announce, “NaNoWriMo is upon us!” What is NaNoWriMo, you ask? It is only the Mount Everest of writing experiences. The Ironman of novel construction. The Iditarod for aspiring authors. If you hope to one day be a writer, it is something you must attempt at least once… View more
Enter the world of Todd Aaron, longtime resident of Payton Living Center, autistic fifty-something hero and heartbreaker, narrator of Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb. To say that reading Best Boy is to enter Todd’s world is gross understatement. Todd has much to say. He will tell you about his lovely mother, long gone now, who… View more
Many of my favorite books are stories of transformation. They are about people who begin a journey one way and emerge at the end completely altered. Through tests and trials, hardships and happy coincidences, they discover their true selves and a new way of living. The story of the Beekman Boys is just such a… View more
There’s a narrative in history and in literature that relinquishes the soul of a bored woman. The woman who has settled into marriage, kids, and finds herself uninteresting. When my husband was in the Army and deployed to Iraq it was in the faces of the young women left behind. For a woman in her… View more
You may know Kate White as the wildly successful editor-and-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. For fourteen years she sat at the helm of this behemoth of a women’s magazine. In 2012, at the top of her game, White passed the torch having increased monthly circulation by 700,000 readers and reached a pinnacle of over three million… View more
“Good morning, class. Your Scholastic book order has arrived.” Were there ever words more magical than these? If you were a young scholar, post-1948, chances are you received a Scholastic order form at school each month. You’d take it home and mark the fifty books you most wanted to purchase. From there, your parents made… View more