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Monthly Archives: November 2011

Alice in Wonderland

Watched this with Melissa, Eric, Ava, and Grace and family.  What a great movie!  Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are so good, so wacky and commanding.  The special effects, costumes, and scenery are dazzling –what else would you expect from Tim Burton? — and the story is straightforward and compelling.

What Alice Forgot

I loved this book.  Alice is a 39-year old mother of 3 who falls in her spin class and wakes believing she is 29, a time when she was childless and happily married.  A LOT has changed.  Liane Moriarty deftly uses the lost memory trope as a way to tell Alice’s story as well as […]

Little Bee

The Inextinguishable Symphony

Martin Goldsmith is a senior commentator on NPR.  He hosted Performance Today, NPR’s daily classical music program, for 10 years.  His parents Gunther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt survived the Nazis in part because of their involvement in the Kulturbund, the sole cultural outlet for Jews approved by the Nazis in 1930’s Germany.   I thought of my […]

The Other Boleyn Girl

Ooo, sorry about the hideous cover.  The book I had looked better.  Neighbor Megan loaned  this to me.  Why didn’t they just use books like these as textbooks for history class in high school?  We would have all paid attention!  About Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.  Politics, religion, lust, love, pain,  OH the human drama. […]

Saving Grace

I just loved this book until the last 10 pages.  Lee Smith is such a natural writer.  I was completely taken in by the journey of Florida Grace Shepherd, full of drama and detail, tenderness and spirit.  But the last 10 pages got strangely, suddenly obtuse and I was annoyed.  I suppose a college professor […]