In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish. The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He …
In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish. The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He …
Currently reading: The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 📚
I shared my favorite books of 2023 in My Year of Reading. 📚
I read 75 books in 2023, my high water mark for the most reading in a year. Books have always been like a warm blanket, and I needed that comfort during a most challenging year. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. — James Baldwin …
Finished reading: Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li 📚 My 75th book of 2023, which is a new personal record for the most books I’ve read in a single year. Many of the stories in this collection touch on the hard to articulate grief of losing a child, which hit home for me. ★★★★☆
Currently reading: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong 📚
Finished reading: Holly by Stephen King 📚
I found this lovely bookmark in my Christmas stocking. Santa knows me so well! 📚
Finished reading: The Private Library by Reid Byers 📚 Book-wrapt — that beneficient feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, inlibriated, circumvolumed, peribibliated … it implies the traditional library wrapped in shelves of books, and the condition of rapt attention to a particular …
Currently reading: Holly by Stephen King 📚
Finished reading: Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark 📚 A slow read over the course of a few months, one chapter/writing tool per sitting. Lots of great tips and advice to improve your writing.
Finished reading: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 📚 Another compelling argument for being present in our lives, and paying close attention to the marvels that surround us. How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted …
Finished reading: The Vagabond’s Way by Rolf Potts 📚
Finished reading: Christine and Blaze by Stephen King 📚 Continuing my quest to read the Stephen King books I missed along the way. With these two, I’ve now read thirteen King books this year. The 700-page Christine book flew by on my Kindle. Lots of supernatural fun mixed in with nostalgia for my …
Finished reading: The Age of Faith by Will Durant 📚 I finished this fourth installment of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization after three months of slow, careful reading. The Age of Faith begins with the fall of Rome and carries through the end of the Middle Ages. The writing is clear, …
Finished reading: Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross 📚 Your Brain on Art is the latest selection from the Next Big Idea Club. The authors did a nice job of gathering scientific evidence of how art making and appreciation physically changes your brain. I loved the part where a scientist …
Finished reading: The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King 📚 Continuing my quest to go back and read the Stephen King books I’ve missed along the way. I listened to the audiobook of this one, narrated by actor Bronson Pinchot. I’ve listened to hundreds of audiobooks, but the narration of …
Finished reading: The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto 📚 What a strange little book. The narrator is slowly driven insane by all the commercial sounds encroaching on his family home: an auto repair shop next door, a nightclub across the street, an idling bus outside his bedroom window, all told in …
Started reading: Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen 📚
Finished reading: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King 📚 Working through the few books of Stephen King I haven’t read. This is a collection of his early stories. A few are dated, and a few are exceptional. There is a bleakness that pervades many of these stories. I hoped for a good outcome for the …
Currently reading: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King 📚 Working my way through the backlog of Stephen King books I haven’t read (I’ve read over 50 of his books!?!). What a gifted and prolific storyteller he is!
Finished reading: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 📚 A good premise perhaps weakened by too many characters and side stories. The depression era setting, poor living conditions, and the horrors of racism and cruel treatment of people with disabilities felt Dickensian. McBride …
I’ve had this old set of Will and Ariel Durant’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Story of Civilization on my bookshelves, collecting dust for almost a quarter of a century. These books belonged to my grandmother, who willed them to me after passing. I inherited her love of reading, so I’ve …
Have you ever run across a book you know you’ve read but can’t recall much about it? Or, come across a passage in a book while you were reading that seemed important — something you knew you could use at some point in the future — but didn’t know where or how to save it so you could find it again?