General News from the World of Literature
Right now, in Nashville, Tennessee, 150 authors are gathering for the 35th Annual Southern Festival of Books. I keep thinking I will go one of these years. As you know, I am a loyal fan of Southern Literature. Someone always asks ‘What is Southern Literature?’ Is it anything written by an author from the South about the South? What’s the big deal? Sarah Beth West,
Readers of this blog may think that I am obsessed with St. Jerome. Well, I am not, BUT I keep running into him on my limited travels. As you may recall, he is the patron saint of libraries; and, therefore, he treasures books and the knowledge they hold. So, I saw his statue in Washington, D.C. Now, perusing the National Gallery in London, which has
On a recent trip to Washington, D. C., I ran into this statue of someone obviously reading. It made me think about the Sandcastle Book Club and the blog. Upon further investigation, I realized this person is Saint Jerome the Priest. This particular statue was sculpted in 1954 by Ivan Mestrovic and sits in front of the Croatian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Mestrovic was born
I have always marvelled at how so many people learn to read and write in Braille. On the surface, the system for visually impaired people looks very complicated. It seems astounding to me that “a blind person can read braille faster than a sighted person can read print.” This fact is taken from an article written by Kelli Finger and published in July 31, 2023,
Some people like to read ‘beach books’ in the summer. Others would rather use extra leisure time to tackle longer and more serious books. If you fall into the latter category, you might be interested in the following two books. They are both fiction, but they are far from ‘flights of fancy’, so to say. Take a look– The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese Remember
We see it on a daily basis. We worry about it. We realize the damage it does to families and society at large. We try to help. What is IT? POVERTY. Headlines of the Washington Post , reviews in the NYT and features on NPR showcase a new book by Matthew Desmond entitled Poverty, by America. While this blog is never meant to be political,
I was reminded just now that Nora Ephron’s book Heartburn turns 40 this year. I don’t think I ever read it! An article by Tobias Mutter in Shelf Awareness reminded me that the ‘novel’ is a thinly veiled version of Ephron’s own life and her husband’s (THE Carl Bernstein of All the President’s Men) affair. A movie version of the book was released in 1986
Ron Charles, Book critic for the Washington Post, asked his Book Club members to describe to him what most annoy them in books. I list a few of them below: –Dreams (Worked for Dickens and Shakespeare, but apparently many readers don’t like dream sequences.) –Typos and grammatical errors –Overused and pretentious words (lugubrious, lubricious and preternatural to name a few) –Excessive length (Of books, paragraphs,
“Truth is stranger than ficiton” is a worn out statement, but it can be remarkably true. Such is the case in the following two books. These books are NOT historical fiction. The first book was written by Ilyon Woo, a writer whose research for the book was funded by National Endowment for the Humanities. Woo received a PhD in English from Columbia University. Master Slave
Wylie and her husbad purchased a home on Kiawah Island in 2020. I recently met Wylie Small, a part time Kiawah resident who also happens to be an author! Her specialty is English history. Wylie sent me the following background information: My love of English history developed when I began to work on my family’s genealogy, about fifteen years ago. Both of my parents had
