Recently I’ve been reading What Makes This Book So Great, by Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Jo Walton. In it, she takes various essays regarding the science fiction/fantasy genre originally blogged on Tor.com, and incorporates them under a single cover. It’s a fascinating read from a well versed and […]
I feel so blessed that I can “work” from home as a book reviewer, essayist and occasionally as a literary editor, and to comfortably say that I read for a living. It’s like living the dream (well, until the bills come in, but that’s neither here nor there). But I […]
Today at the dog park, one of the topics discussed by us “8:30 regulars” included high school graduations. It is, after all, that time of year, for mortarboards and diplomas and college visits and looking forward. Some of the folks at the park have kids who are graduating in a […]
This week, I’m reposting one of my very favorite Gimblings – a little poem I wrote a few years ago that still feels true today. My house is a little less hoard-ish since I wrote this, but it’s still chock full of books. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Too Many […]
In the first telling of the tale, I don’t pick up the book at all. It is a very short story. The next time around, the book is lying around, in a place where I need to while away some time. I pick it up, idly flipping through the pages. […]
Back in November 2012, I wrote my very first Gimbling in the Wabe. It was the brainchild of LitStack’s Editor-in-Chief, Tee Tate, and she told me that with this new weekly feature, I could write about anything I wanted, even if it had little to do with literature. I took […]
I was watching television the other day when an ad came on informing me that for this Mother’s Day, “smart phones trump flowers”, suggesting that in order to show your mother how much you appreciate her, you need to give her not flowers, but a smart phone. Another ad on […]
Hi, my name is Sharon. I’m a library request addict. It used to be I would only request a few books a week from my local library. Books I’d been wanting to read for a while or books that friends had recommended, occasionally a title I’d read about in the […]
For the final Gimbling in the Wabe of this year’s National Poetry Month, I am highlighting a poet who, to me, epitomizes the music that swells inside of us, that is both deeply personal and yet encompasses the omniscience of the beauty and solace of the natural world: Mary Oliver. […]
Edna St. Vincent Millay was already a published poet in her teen years, but it was at age nineteen when she submitted her poem, Renascence, to a contest run by The Lyric Year that the world sat up and took notice – not because it won, but because it didn’t. […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.