I have decided not to buy any more books till I delve into each of the ones on my bookcase shelves and decide either to read or give it away. I started The Distinguished Guest a couple of weeks ago. It begins, “In 1982, when she was seventy-two years old, Lily Roberts Maynard published her first book.”
And then I met Lily, who is now over eighty, rather famous, and struggling to keep up with her reputation as a purveyor of all things well-written and wise. Sought after by journalists for her sharp-tongued and witty observations, Lily is also an irritating, often infuriating mystery to her grown children and grandchildren…

Oh my goodness, this woman can write. I read where someone referred to this book as “a scream and a song”, and I totally agree. Karla reminds me of Roxanne Gay, in that she’s angry and raw and boldly honest, not only about her rage and how difficult it is for immigrants to move ahead, but also about her own shortcomings and demons.

Born in Ecuador in 1989, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was left there with her grandparents when she was eighteen months old, while her parents went to America to earn a living. Four years later, she moved to America and lived with her family in the borough of Queens, New York. Education was of primary importance to her family, and Karla was smart and shone in school. There is no doubt that Karla was hurt and deeply affected by the years she was separated from her parents and by the discrimination she encountered in America.

On our most recent trip to California, I forgot all my books AND my Kindle, and, searching through the casita where we stay, came across THE BOOK WOMAN of TROUBLESOME CREEK, which my sister-in-law had left on a previous visit. I’m not often drawn to historical fiction but needed something to read, so decided to give it a try. Wow. What a great surprise.

   If I could write like any other writer, I just might choose Jenny Orwill. A friend loaned me DEPT. OF SPECULATION, and I devoured it in a couple of days, not only because it’s short (a hundred seventy-nine pages), but because the writing itself impacted me so much....

I’ve had a hard time settling into reading. I’ve recently started two books and gave up on them because they had too many characters for me to keep straight. On impulse, after reading a review, I ordered THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC.

A friend mailed this book to me a few weeks after I got to California. I’d had a hard time reading anything other than recipes and creative substitutes for ingredients, but I was immediately taken by Father Boyle’s writing style and the humor and insight he brings to his stories about the people he’s worked with for decades as a Jesuit priest at Delores Mission Church in Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world.

    I love it when I get surprised in a serendipitous way, as if universal forces and my higher self are conspiring. I went to see the latest version of Little Women, and, unlike with previous versions, I kept remembering specific lines of narrative and...

    For the last month, I've had trouble settling in and reading. Email, Facebook, afternoon movies, my novel in progress, and way too many NY Times Crossword puzzles enticed me, and I gave in to their power. I started a couple of books and couldn't finish...

    READER ON THE 6.27 was a book club selection, and I started it with no idea of what I was getting into. I knew it was translated from the original French, and that it's an international bestseller, and that, at 204 pages, it's relatively short. I knew I...

    I'm FB friends with the writer Richard Bausch and mistakenly thought I was buying his book when I purchased Robert Bausch's IN THE FALL, THEY COME BACK. It's the story of Ben Jameson, a young prep school teacher, and his attempts to right some horrific...

    PROOF OF HEAVEN was a selection by my book club. Dr. Alexander, the author, is a neurosurgeon from North Carolina who inexplicably contracted an extremely rare form of bacterial meningitis that literally eats the brain, beginning with the neo-cortex. The...

    I was in the Library, looking for movies on DVD, when this book's title grabbed me in the Library. ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE? Really? Yes, really. ELEANOR OLIPHANT is bigger than life, on one hand, and totally believable on another. She's one...

I'm not real crazy about self-help books. I find them oversimplified, often preachy. But, when I came across a twenty-fifth anniversary copy of FEEL THE FEAR and saw that it was published in 2012 (the year of Dr. Susan Jeffers' death), making the book thirty-two years...

Laurie Parker calls herself “Mississippi Writer Laurie Parker”. No way could I not buy and read a book by a woman, who, though I know from our Facebook association, is twenty years younger than I, has lived in about every town I’ve lived in and gone to school where I...

I like the premise of this book. Two women in their eighties, one black, one white, live next door to each other in Katterjin, an upscale community in modern day South Africa. Hortensia, who is black, despises Marion’s racism. Marion hates Hortensia because Hortensia hates her…

The fact that I am 137 pages into this 422 page book, and my monthly book review was due two days ago, tells you how busy I am this Christmas. A good busy, I’m happy to report, but not much time to finish Ruth Ozeki’s masterpiece, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING. I say “masterpiece” after such a short time with this book because…

Eighty-year old Arthur has lunch beside his wife’s grave everyday. He eats his sandwich as he talks to her in the achingly familiar way of long time partners and then goes home alone, where he’s settled into a routine that brings him safety but little satisfaction…

Celestial and Roy, a thirty-something African American couple, are married and living the American dream in Atlanta. Roy is in sales. Celestial is an artist who makes stuffed dolls called “poupees”.  Roy and Celestial have their challenges, but mostly, they're tight...

I've read parts of several Gladwell books. He has brilliant, creative ideas about how things work and gives detailed examples from history and science to support them. I'm usually very engaged at the beginning, then bog down with too many lengthy examples illustrating...

This was a book selection by my new book group at church. I looked forward to it, as I'm all about a path to a new America, and I respect Jim Wallis, who is a force. He's editor-in-chief of Sojourners, a progressive monthly magazine and daily online publication of the...

This memoir was a selection by my book club, and I went into it pretty blind. I'd seen Trevor Noah speak a few times and knew he was sharp and funny and politically astute. But I didn't know what to expect from BORN A CRIME. I liked Noah's voice from the getgo —...

Last month, I wrote that I'd not yet finished this novel about the relationship between fifteen year old Enid and her thirtiesh ex-boxer uncle, Felix. This one I finished. The novel is astonishingly well written, from several characters' points of view. Joyce Carol...

It's been awhile since I read a book I did not want to put down. I don't even like the term “page turner”. But BEHOLD THE DREAMERS got me. When Jenga and Neni, a young immigrant couple from Cameroon, become involved financially and personally with Clark and Cindy, a...

I so want to like fantasy. I want to be a member of the Game of Thrones club, though the thought of watching an episode leaves me flat. I wanted to celebrate women's power in Wonder Woman, but I spaced out after the first five minutes and regretted wasting the time. I...

As a psychotherapist, I worked with many clients who were abused as children. And I've read several novels that tackle the issue of traumatic abuse and resulting dissociation, in which the victim's hurt “parts” surface after a long period of repression. So I was eager...

After the bustle of the holidays and a couple of nasty colds, Ed and I have been struggling with getting back to being creative. I'm avoiding working on my novel. He's nervous about an upcoming sermon. We thought IF YOU WANT TO WRITE might help, so I've been reading a...

I've been smitten by Elizabeth Strout since I read OLIVE KITTEREDGE, and even more enamored since taking a class from her a few years ago. The woman can write. Her characters are expertly drawn as are the dynamics of their relationships. Awhile back, I read MY NAME IS...

Rebekah Demirel grew up in circumstances that could have flattened or destroyed her. But they didn't. She not only survived, she flourished. Rebekah's determination, her smarts, and her goodness, transformed wounds from her abusive, neglectful upbringing and her...

Ed (my Seattle native husband who lived in Mississippi for fifteen years), has long insisted that my native deep South is a foreign country. I've told him no it is not either, you better stop saying that, you don't know anything, you're a Yankee. Then I read...

After reading memoir for awhile, I was hungry for a novel, and COMMONWEALTH was on my recommended Kindle list. I bought it on impulse. It didn't take long to see I'd spend a lot of time figuring out (or being confused by) who was who. Two families split up, two of the...

Roxane Gay used to scare me. I admired her and thought she was a fine writer, but found her criticisms of authors and literary works scathing. I imagined her a fierce opponent to cultural appropriation, and, as a white woman writing about black people, I was...

I bought this book because the author, whom I follow on Facebook, announced that it was on sale, and I'd read A GIRL CALLED ZIPPY by the same author and liked it a good bit, and I found the title, SHE GOT UP OFF THE COUCH, wonderfully straightforward, yet...

Atul Gawande is a physician with significant gifts. He's a competent medical practitioner. He's able and willing to observe himself and his colleagues in a way divested of the ego many doctors can't quell. And he can write. This combination made me stick with, finish,...

I haven't felt much like a warrior lately. Being addressed as one felt empowering when I chanced on an ad for CARRY ON, WARRIOR. Brene Brown loves the book, as does Anne Lamott, and since they're two warriors I admire, I figured I'd try it.I've heard Anne Lamott's...

I found this book at a recent workshop facilitated by the author. It was my first time working with Ana Maria Spagna, a talented, courageous, caring woman who lives in Stehekin, Washington. TEST RIDE, part mystery, part history, part memoir, struck and surprised me...

“Trust the art, not the artist,” I've heard. Leonard Cohen has been iconic to me, and I was wary about reading his biography. A friend told me he wasn't painted in the best light, particularly where women are concerned, and I didn't want to lose my idealized image of...

Rachel Kalama, a little girl in 1890's Honolulu, immediately grabbed me with her straightforward sweetness and spunk. The spunk would serve her especially well, because at the age of seven, Rachel was sent to Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka'i, the isolated leper...

Fiction is short on protagonists who are, as my book club friend, Cindy, says, “women of a certain age”. That's only one reason I like THIS ROAD WE TRAVELED, the latest of acclaimed, award winning Jane Kirkpatrick's historical fiction novels.The book's protagonist is...

I didn't read a book this month. I started two—THE ROAD WE TRAVELED, by Jane Kirkpatrick, and HILLBILLY ELEGY, by John Vance. But I, like many of you, got clobbered by the presidential election, “clobbered” as in scared and depressed and anxious and “off”, and,...

A Facebook author friend, Haven Kimmel, recommended this book by her friend, and, since I admire her taste, I bought it. I was reading another book when MY FATHER'S GUITAR arrived, but decided to start Skibell's anyway, and it hooked me from the start. I kept reading...

I just tanked on Eric Larsen's THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA. As soon as I started the book, I heard my granddaughter Sophie's voice in my head. When I suggest a book or movie to Sophie, she often gets solemn and says, “Granola. That's not my genre.”I committed to...

Take a newborn girl, give her a condition that will embarrass her, limit her greatly, and likely keep her from getting close to anyone, much less take a boyfriend or a lover. Now watch this girl, Jane Chisolm, watch her live her life in the early 1920s in rural...

Convincing dialect is hard to write. I've been honing the black voices in my novel for years. In DELICIOUS FOODS, James Hannaham writes black dialect so delicious I could eat it with a spoon. I could slurp up his descriptions too. Over and over, I was taken with the...

I bought WE ARE NOT OURSELVES at Fact and Fiction, a great indy bookstore in Missoula, Montana. I'd never heard of the book but was impressed and intrigued at how many “bests” it received, including Publishers Weekly “Best Books of 2014” and Esquire's “5 Most...

I waited hard, along with a jillion other TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD fans, for the follow up to that beloved novel. I knew that GO SET A WATCHMAN is not really a sequel, but was written before TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I read the controversy about Harper Lee, how she was ill,...

I spotted THE LOVE SONG OF MISS QUEENIE HENNESSY in Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle. When I saw it was the follow-up to THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRYE, which I reviewed last July, I bought it, and I'm glad I did.Queenie Hennessy, in hospice in Berwick on...

I fell in writerly love with Elizabeth Strout when she spoke at a writer's conference I attended. She had just finished writing OLIVE KITTERIDGE, with one of the finest character portrayals I'd read. Strout is a master at making us care about Olive, a woman brimming...

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME is not an easy read. I spent more time than usual re-reading passages and looking up definitions. I'm pleased that my vocabulary is now enriched.       The descriptions of the treatment the author, his family, and his friends endured because...

"That was it. That was all of it,” Frank Drum says. “A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word." I don't know what it is about midwestern male writers. I’ve...

The anthem, “Peace, Love, and Barbecue,” on my husband Ed’s apron, proclaims him an aging Baby Boomer. Boomers are Dr. Bill Thomas’s subject and target audience in his inspiring book, SECOND WIND. Every eight to ten seconds, someone in the U.S. turns sixty-five,...

I’m not a big fan of advice columnists, but Cheryl Strayed, author of the blockbuster, WILD, is an exception. In 2010, before WILD was published, Strayed was revealed as “Dear Sugar”, online advice columnist. TINY, BEAUTIFUL THINGS is a compilation of her answers to...

It's been awhile since I didn’t want a book to end. I’m delighted to say it just happened with Nick Hornby’s HOW TO BE GOOD. The magnificent dialog between Katie and David, an unhappily married couple in London, grabbed me from the beginning.The tension, sarcasm, and...

I’ve loved Kent Haruf since I read PLAINSONG in the nineties. I continue to be amazed at how he conveys our deepest human selves in language that’s beautifully sparse, yet satisfying and deep. OUR SOULS AT NIGHT is the story of Addie and Louis, seventy-year-old,...

Rachel Joyce’s THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY kept me turning pages. She gave me a character on a spiritual/physical quest—battling time, the odds, his own doubt, and painful memories. Harold, aged sixty-five and never a walker, leaves his London home and...