Review of “First Daughter” by Eric Lustbader

I’ve been sick with allergies and on lots of medication, so it has been hard to find a book on which I can concentrate. Sunday, I started four different books and set them down before determining that the only solution was to read a book appropriate for my condition. The book I chose was First [...]

Review of “The Various Haunts of Men” by Susan Hill

This is Book One of the mystery series by U.K. author Susan Hill involving Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler and set in fictional Lafferton, a Cathedral city in the South of England. In The Various Haunts of Men, Detective Sergeant Freya Graffham has come to work in Lafferton to escape the stress of life in [...]

Review of The Movie Version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson

Sunday we went to see the movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Both my husband and I have read all three books in the trilogy, so there were no surprises. Nevertheless, I was biting my nails through a lot of the movie. The movie has subtitles, but that didn’t [...]

What Are Your Criteria for Following Blogs?

I have a lot of blogs in my Google Reader, but generally they are of four sorts, even though there is some overlap. I follow one set of bloggers because I have come to like them very much personally. Often our taste in books diverges so much that if one of them rates a book [...]

April 23, 1856 – Birthday of Granville T. Woods, “The Black Edison”

Granville T. Woods was an African American born in Columbus, Ohio on this date in 1856. The most prolific African-American inventor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he came up with numerous inventions including a steam-boiler furnace, telephone, telegraph system, electric railway and automatic air brake for railroad safety. If you thought that [...]

Review of “We Have Always Lived in The Castle” by Shirley Jackson

Constance Blackwood, age 28, and her 18-year-old sister Merricat have lived alone in a mansion with their Uncle Julian for the past six years. The rest of the family was poisoned with arsenic at dinner one night. Constance, always the responsible one, took the blame for the poisoning but it is not totally clear for [...]

Review of “Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie” by Alan Bradley

Flavia de Luce is a very precocious eleven year old living in England in 1950 who does not yet seem to have any hormones but who does have an inordinately strong penchant for chemistry. She lives alone in a big house with her father, the memory of her dead mother (who died while Flavia was [...]

Flowers in the Desert

It’s allergy time blossoming time in the dessert :

April 15, 1865 – Death of President Lincoln – A Poetry Month Perspective

On April 14, 1865, fears for the President’s life were on the increase among his friends and advisors. He planned to attend a play that night, the comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s theater, but several aids sought to dissuade him from going. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton pleaded with the president not to go. [...]

Review of “The Swimming Pool” by Holly LeCraw

This is a book in which I did not like the main character. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a problem, except that I got the distinct impression that the author loved her female protagonist, Marcella Atkinson, and the effete lifestyle lived by the characters. In fact, I often felt the author’s presence – consciously trying to [...]