The summer of 2020 is unlike those past—no traveling, no baseball games, limited beach and park time, if any, and none of the barbecues and gatherings under the sun that so define our idea of summer. With that in mind, here are some summer-themed reads, escapes reminiscent of summers past […]
Cutting Teeth, by Julia Fierro When my daughter was little, there was a universally acknowledged sentiment among the parents I knew. We referred to summer as the busy season, when the steady routine of the school year fell away and the schedule went overtime. Still, when your kids are small, […]
Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy Hardy’s novel of romantic entanglements and farming rural life, set in fictional nineteenth-century county Wessex is the perfect book for a summer read. This tale of Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, first published in 1874, takes its time, and let’s the reader […]
The Bookseller is reporting that details on the second mystery novel penned by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym for J.K. Rowling) have been released. The second installment in the Cormoran Strike crime series will concern the murder of a novelist and is titled The Silkworm. The Silkworm follows private investigator Cormoran Strike […]
Rules of Summer Joanna Philbin Poppy, an imprint of Little, Brown, and Company 978-0-316-21205-2 In Joanna Philbin’s recently released YA novel, Rory McShane desperately wants to escape her childish needy mother for the summer. She goes to live with and work for wealthy Larry and Lucy Rule and their family […]
Ah, summer. We love the sand between our toes, the water splashing our faces and, of course, those great “summer reads” that make the days seem long and lazy. There are a few certain titles, however, that we’d willingly fast forward time to get our hands on. From horror to […]
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.