Skip to content

Monthly Archives: January 2016

When The Moon Is Low

Loved this fast-paced straightfoward fiction about an Afgahni woman, Feireba, who leaves war-torn Kabul with her 3 children after her husband is murdered by the Taliban.  I grieved with Feireba and her teenaged son Saleem who tell the story of their desperate journey through Turkey, into Greece, and on through Italy and France — the […]

Brain on Fire

At 24, Susannah Cahalan is beset for serious and ever-worsening symptoms from hallucinations and migraines to paranoia and intense elation.  Diagnosis of severe seizures lands her in the hospital completely unable to function and without hope until one in a vast parade of doctors happens to ask her to draw a clock. After she painstakingly […]

The Outsiders

This book was written in 1967.  I read it in the 80s.  Now Lucy and her friends in the 8th Grade Book Club are reading it in 2016 and LOVING IT.  Haven’t seen them this enthusiastic about a book yet.  Ponyboy, Sodapop, Darry, Two-Bit, and Johnny’s story is, apparently, timeless.

The Light of the World

I first read Elizabeth Alexander’s story as a personal essay in the New Yorker.  This memoir generously and lushly tells the entire story of her marriage to Ficre and the sudden loss of him at age 50.  I cried my way through this.  I could feel her poet’s heart in all these words.  Art and […]

Without You, There Is No Us

Journalist Suki Kim teaches “the sons of the elite” English for 2 semesters at a private university in North Korea financed by evangelical Christians in order to learn more about life in the repressive, secretive regime.  My reading about North Korea is so much more depressing than my reading about the Holocaust and not just […]