In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...

Don’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...

I’m experiencing a concatenation of ideas about writing, self-understanding and self-actualization. Joan Didion started it. After her...

I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...

I’ve never been big on making New Year’s Resolutions. In fact, the idea used to annoy me deeply back when I worked out at a gym and...

I’m trying to reread Anam Cara, and I can’t stomach the pollyanna sunshine spiritual message. O’Donohue writes, “Light is the secret...

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about Indigenous Americans’ Original Instructions. “These are not ‘instructions’ like...

To my delight, I fell down a Maxine Hong Kingston rabbit hole and discovered this gem from an interview in The Guardian. Describing a...

Rereading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I caved in and let myself skip Helen’s painful awakening to her husband’s true character. At first...

Reading Edith Wharton, the biography by Hermione Lee, I’m becoming aware of why I never liked to read Edth Wharton’s novels, which are...

I’m entranced by Eudora Welty right now. Reading her short story "Livvie," I’m awed by how much Welty does in just ten pages. In One...

Having read Angela’s Ashes and The Liar’s Club in quick succession, I was beginning to think that the only enjoyable memoirs overflow...

I used to pay a lot of attention to the first lines in books. I had a notebook where I wrote them down and classified them according to...

In Sally Ledger’s Introduction to Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Books, she writes, “Redemption through suffering is a significant...

Ooph.I was relishing Mary Karr’s delicious language, but didn’t realize that this line I so admired - “Maybe it's wrong to blame the...

Penelope Fitzgerald always wanted her children to be well-educated, to study foreign languages, to be employable. In her biography of...

I’m learning to slow down and savor Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. It’s a good story that gallops along and then arrests my attention with...

“I am intrigued by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked.”...

And the most disappointing thing about the book is the way Liz Gilbert seems to suggest that in finding Felipe she’s completed her...

Soul Vows is my favorite of Janet Conner’s books. I have gone through it twice and have twice crafted my own set of vows. I think that’s...