Happy Super Tuesday! If you’re in a Super Tuesday state – go vote! This blog post will still be here when you get back. Or you can read it while in line at the polls. Now on to the rest of the post. Our two top selling books in the gift shop where I work (at least, until the new Little Women movie was released this past December) are Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey and Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. The most commented on book in our gift shop? […]
Using Fiction to Understand the Past
There is something about reading a book that has familiar landmarks. Not even necessarily places that you’ve actually been to (though being able to actually visualize where you are in the book is fun), but places that you’re actively interested in, time periods you’ve spent scads of time researching. I’m currently reading The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, and while I love my ability to mentally follow Towner down Derby Street, up Hawthorne past the hotel and up to the Common, well… It reminded me of yet another book where it wasn’t quite the same, […]
Book Review: The Collector’s Apprentice
I’ll admit, this is one of those books where I can’t tell if it started dragging because I was getting slogged down in all the technical art study and theory, or if it started dragging because I had half a dozen other books I wanted to pick up. (That half a dozen other books always seems more tempting when the book you’re reading has a deadline…) Disregarding those moments where I really felt like I was slogging (and I admit, I started skimming through those sections just to keep pace), the book was pretty good. […]
The Art of Making Espresso: 9 Years Later
Back in 2011 I wrote a post about how excited I was to learn how to use an espresso machine and make my own drinks. How I wanted to buy an espresso machine to practice at home. (I will note here, I also said I could find an espresso machine for $300. Seriously? It’s closer to $600, at bare minimum!) I was very focused on making caramel steamers – who cares about the espresso?!? In any event, life has changed a bit since then, and I have learned that you don’t need to have an […]
Tea Break: Steven Smith Teamaker
It’s always nice to step back every once and awhile to review those things that make a day of reading comfortable and cozy. There was a comic strip that was going around on Facebook the other day that illustrated what those things were just the other day. According to this, “Stage 1 Coziness” is simply a book. A cuppa and a sweater is all that is added to create “Stage 2 Coziness”. So in the interest of creating some “Stage 2 Coziness” of our own, I’m taking a look at a tea brand that I […]
BOTM: January 2020
How do we start the year off on the right foot? With new books of course! For the month of January I have two books from Book of the Month! Because I’m a Book of the Month BFF, I get one of the finalists for Book of the Year in my January box – so I went with A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum. While I’m intrigued by the Book of the Year winner – Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I also have to admit that it also doesn’t […]
An Overabundance of Alices
Is it just me or is the name “Alice” in just about everything I’ve been reading recently? I was looking over this website and happened to notice that the name Alice wanted to leap from every other page. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, After Alice, The Alice Network, Alice in The Glittering Hour. And that’s just the book references. We can go further back than just recently as well: Alice shows up as a name in quite a few things – including Twilight. I mean, I like the name Alice. I do. Some of my favorite […]
Book Review: The Glittering Hour
This one was a bit heart-wrenching. The Glittering Hour by Iona Grey is the kind of book you pick up thinking that it is going to be sweet – and it is on a number of levels. Most of the story is told through the perspective of Alice, daughter of one of the “Bright Young Things” that everyone talked about in the 1920s. And certainly, it starts off sweetly enough. Alice’s mother has put together a treasure hunt for her. A treasure hunt to explain how Alice came to be. And then you find yourself […]
Book Review: Uprooted
Uprooted by Naomi Novik was recommended to me as something to read to help with the end-of-book depression that I experienced at the end of The Starless Sea. Suffice it to say that it had been coming up more and more frequently in my suggested reading – whether it was Goodreads, What Should I Read Next?, or any of the other go-to sources of suggested reading material. Of course, Naomi Novik was not completely unknown to me. I had picked up Spinning Silver as my Book of the Month Club pick when that came out. […]
Book Review: The Alice Network
I’m spending some time this month going over the books I read in 2019 and thinking about whether I ought to fix the fact that I never wrote out a proper review for them. (If you looked at my post 2019 in Books: The Full Rundown, you’ll get a picture of everything that I read this year.) A fair number of those books were read for book club (better known as the CH Armchair Detective Society). The purpose of this book club was mostly for work – better team bonding, but doing so in the […]