Haunting Book: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
I’m turning now from haunting books that deal with violence and man’s inhumanity to man on a global level (The Hunger Games trilogy, The Sandcastle Girls, and Unbroken) to a novel that haunts because of the violence and inhumanity within a family. Gone Girl, a bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, focuses on a most unfortunate […]
Memories: In Song and Words
We don’t know what will suddenly bring a dormant memory to consciousness. For Proust, it was the taste of madeleines. For me, it was a hymn sung in church. “Whatsoever you do” was the song sung after communion at Mass a couple of weeks ago. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers . […]
Haunting Book: Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
The third haunting book I’ve read in recent months is Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Unbroken is the true story of Louis Zamperini, a man who lived a life that can only be called “larger than life.” During his boyhood in California, Louie Zamperini was a juvenile delinquent. To keep Louie out of trouble, his older brother made […]
Oregon City: End of the Trail
If the emigrants on the Oregon Trail were fortunate, they reached Oregon City in the Willamette Valley sometime in October – about six months after they began their journey from what was then the United States. The dangers of their trek continued even through the last weeks, when the travelers had to choose between rafting […]
Haunting Book: The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian
The second of the haunting books in my October series is The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian. This novel is set in two time periods – the narrator lives in current times, and her grandparents met and fell in love during the Armenian Genocide in World War I. Like all the books in my “haunting” […]
Breakfast Date: Frank’s of Parkville and English Landing Park
For a year or two now, my husband has been trying to get me to go out to breakfast with him at Frank’s Restaurant in Parkville, MO, not too far from our home. On Saturday, September 29, it finally happened. Our breakfast date was possible because Al didn’t have to row that morning, which is […]
Haunting Books: The Hunger Games Trilogy
In the past few months I’ve read several books that have continued to haunt me weeks after I turned the last page. So on Wednesdays in October (the traditional month for haunting), I’ll be posting about some of these books. None of the books I’ll write about is a horror book per se. I don’t […]
Plotting a Novel – Try this for NaNoWriMo
I wish I knew more about plotting a novel. It’s one of the reasons I kick myself for not beginning my writing career earlier in life. If I’d spent my twenties starving in a garret as a writer, I’d be through the worst of the learning curve now. I’d have finished the 10,000 hours of […]
Middlebury College: Teaching Maturity Along with Liberal Arts
I’ve often said that the best thing my parents ever did for me was to send me 3,000 miles away from home. At age 17, I went from home in Washington State to Middlebury College in Vermont. And I grew up very quickly. I hadn’t liked myself very well in high school. I was bookish […]
You Know Your Children Are Grown When . . .
1. You find a long list of alcoholic beverages in your car in your son’s handwriting, and realize there’s nothing you can (or should) say to him, because he’s thirty years old, and he was on a liquor store run for his grandmother. 2. Your daughter tells you not to get glasses that make you […]