Monday Musing – Fiction or Non?

Do you read nonfiction regularly?  Do you read it in a different way or place than you read fiction?
 
Perfect timing for this question, as I’m reading a nonfiction book just now – A House in Fez, by Suzanna Clarke, who purchased an ancient, dilapidated riad  (home) in Morrocco, and undertook the process of restoring it to [...]

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The Sunday Salon-Summer Reading

 The light in Angela’s backyard was dappled by the trees, as it always was in the full of their season, but there was enough of it to read by.  She’d cut the grass that morning, and it’s fragrance still lingered.  The family of birds that made their home in her yard – red-breasted nuthatches, according [...]

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The Mad Poet Society

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye
Much sense the starkest madness.
…Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you’re straightaway dangerous
And handled with a chain.
~Emily Dickinson
Mad poets fascinate me.  Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton – modern American women whose emotional travails fueled powerful poetry and were splashed across the lexicon of mad poets.   Nearly a century earlier Emily Dickinson lay claim [...]

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The Sunday Salon – Comfort in a Sea of Change

It’s inevitable, I suppose~change.  I’m surrounded by it these days, and the changes I see belie the swelling of new buds on my trees and the lawns suddenly awash with green.  A large part of my life involves elderly family members, some of them drawing nearer to that most elemental change, the transformation from life [...]

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Gone to Coventry

The stone walls are scattered like broken, human music across the countryside.  Used to mark boundaries, they were made from clearing the fields.  The size of the stones gets progressively smaller as the walls get higher.  The large stones are all at the base of the wall, and the walls themselves are only as high [...]

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The Sunday Salon – Armchair Traveling

 

 
With spring, my fancy turns to travel…something about blue skies and warm breezes stirs the wanderlust in me, and I find myself with a persistent urge to jump in the car, open wide the sun roof, set the cruise control, and drive.
Alas, I have had to be content with armchair traveling this week, and lucky [...]

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The Reading Woman

“It’s just a little something,” my friend Pat said, handing me a small blue and white gift bag. ” It has absolutely no practical purpose at all.”
“That’s actually the perfect kind of gift,” I answered.  Reaching inside past the tufted white tissue, I pulled out a bound book of postcards entitled Reading Woman, each of the 30 cards [...]

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Booking Through Thursday: The Numbers Game

Here’s the question for Booking Through Thursday: Some people read one book at a time. Some people have a number of them on the go at any given time, perhaps a reading in bed book, a breakfast table book, a bathroom book, and so on, which leads me to… Are you currently reading more than [...]

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Tea and other Ayama Na Tales

The other week my son and daughter in law (who have been living in my daughter in law’s home town of Hat Yai in southern Thailand) went shopping at the local mall.  My son stocked up on his favorite goodies – newly released videos games, some extra memory for his computer, and a lens for his [...]

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The Sunday Salon- Creating Imaginary Countries

Good Morning!  Hurry inside out of those cold April showers~ there’s someone special I want you to meet!
Eleanor Bluestein, author of Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales, has stopped into the Sunday Salon with a guest post.  She’s been telling me all about creating the imaginary South East Asian nation which is at the heart of this delightful short [...]

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