New Year’s Eve 2011

Different cultures have different traditions about what to do on New Year’s Eve to ensure good luck for the following year. In my opinion, Spain has some of the most interesting! One popular tradition in Spain is called “Las Doce Uvas de la Buena Suerte” or The Twelve Grapes of Good Luck.” At 12 seconds [...]

Top Ten(ish) Books I Read in 2011

Most romantic book – YA: Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater This was also one of my favorite reads of the year. Most affecting books: The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman, The Orchard by Theresa Weir, and Grant’s Final Victory by Charles Bracelen Flood These books tested my Kleenex supplies. Most heart-warming: Crossing the Tracks by [...]

Review of “The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1”

This little book features very tiny stories from sixty contributors (culled from over 8,500 contributions) using minimal words and pictures (only one or two pages for each) to convey a story. The stories can be suggestive, expanded upon, or taken as is for an enjoyable creation formed from many new voices. Personally, if I were [...]

Review of “The Informationist” by Taylor Stevens

Vanessa Michael Munroe is an “informationalist,” someone who is known as an expert in finding out what corporations need to know in any setting, especially in Africa, the land of her birth. Born to missionaries in Cameroon, she spent nearly eighteen years living in Africa, and speaks twenty-two languages. It serves her amazingly well in [...]

Review of “Winter Town” by Stephen Emond

Winter Town is a graphic-style novel, combining passages of text with art and occasional comic strips. The story did not move me much, except to irritation over the immaturity of the characters and even more so, over the excessively detailed descriptions of everything they said to one another, no matter how inane or monumentally inconsequential. [...]

Merry Christmas 2011 from Tucson, Arizona

In Tucson, many people put Christmas lights on saguaro cacti (the name is pronounced ‘sah-wah-roh’). Saguaros are found exclusively in the Sonoran Desert. [The Sonoran Desert straddles part of the United States-Mexico border and covers large parts of the U.S. states of Arizona and California and the northwest Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and [...]

Mistletoe in Tucson Is Not For Kissing

According to some sources, the practice of hanging mistletoe in the house goes back to the times of the Druids, members of the priestly class in Britain, Ireland and Gaul and possibly other parts of Celtic western Europe during the Iron Age. (The Iron Age began in the 8th century BCE in Central Europe and [...]

Review of “Half-Past Dawn” by Richard Doetsch

This thriller reminded me of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, with a bit of Michael Koryta’s Cypress House thrown in to add some paranormal flavor. It is hard to know who is telling the truth, which are the good guys and which are the bad, and even what is real and what is imagined. And for [...]

Review of “Plainsong” by Kent Haruf

A book club friend told me that since I liked the author Tom McNeal so much, I would probably like Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and when in D.C. I was lucky enough to have Plainsong given to me to the dashing Thomas of My Porch. The epigraph tells us that “plainsong” is “the unisonous vocal [...]

Review of “Promise Me” by Richard Paul Evans

What is it with these Christmas books? No matter how much alike they are, no matter how predictable, you can’t get through them without crying. This one is about a young woman, Beth, who was not having a good life. It was 1989. Beth discovered her husband was cheating. A lot. Nevertheless, she decided she [...]