I voted this week! If you haven’t yet voted, I strongly recommend you do. Voting is important every year, even the midterms, but especially this year with the Iran War, high tariffs, ICE raids and shootings and immigrants’ deaths in custody, grocery and fuel prices running away from us. I would never tell you...
Novel Review London bored Richard Hanney. Though a Scotsman by birth, he grew up in Rhodesia, where he became a mining engineer and prospector. But London was too tame for his taste, so he planned to leave it to seek adventures elsewhere. Then, he met a fellow tenant, Franklin P. Scudder, who told him...
Welcome! I spare you the gory details, but I am coming off a head cold right now. It started last Sunday, but it came on real strong on Monday. I felt better Tuesday, which was fortunate because my brother and I planned to drive to Olympia that day, but during the trip, my eyes...
Novel Review Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep begins: Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again become aware that this world had been created without thought of him. And for the next...
Welcome! The most exciting thing this week is my purchase of books. With over 1,000 books in my personal library, I don’t need more books, but I still buy them. I went into Barnes & Noble to pass the time before my movie started. I am just looking, I thought. I will start with...
Years ago, I used to publish a series of short blog posts where I told you what I was doing, what movies I saw, and what you could look forward to. I called them my Coffee Sunday articles, since I published them on—you guessed it—Sundays. Though I don’t remember why I stopped them, I...
Novel Review One day in Bridger’s Wells, two cowboys came to relieve themselves of the tension of managing a herd of cattle. One of them, Art Croft, the narrator, passed the time of the ride by watching chipmunks and jays play or noticing how blue the sky is. Once they reached town, the other,...
Novel Review For years, I thought Wuthering Heights would be a love story, and I avoided reading it because of that. I have nothing against love stories, but I rarely read them. I thought it was about Heathcliff and Catherine’s love for each other. A recent trailer for a movie inspired by the novel,...
Short Story Review As I read The Stackpole Legend, I found myself comparing it to another recent read of mine, Ethan Frome. Both Delinthus Stackpole and Ethan Frome seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Both were laconic farmers who inherited their farms from parents who, one imagines, were also laconic. Both had...
In The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, 11 years before the Great War began, Erskine Childers envisioned the preparation for a war between Great Britain and Germany that we recognize could have happened. I take it as a cautionary tale. When nations want to war with each other, they will find a...
