Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 2004 In Anne of Green Gables, Anne muses: "How do you know but that it hurts a geranium's feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else?” The act of naming is one of primary importance -- from PEI to India
Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me Freehand Books, 2010 It’s not just a problem for the curly-headed folks: even with straight hair, there are tangles, knots, and snarls. Everybody can relate to the struggle to make a course smooth once more. And these days, increasingly
Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party Thomas Allen, 2010 A lot of readers think of short stories like the crumbs on the cover image of Sarah Selecky’s stories: short stories are what’s left behind when a writer couldn’t make something whole out of an idea, couldn’t serve it
Having felt bookishly starved in 2009 and rather over-stuffed in 2010, it's taken me some time to plan the menu for my 2011 reading year. Then, this past week, I tested the seasoning, to see if this blend of eleven ingredients will be the perfect sort of bookishness that I’ve
