Anne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery
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“No commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.”
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Molly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body
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Molly McCully Brown cannot forget she has a body. Many of us can. We float through life without recognizing the way we move from one place to another. Brown lives with severe cerebral palsy. She is “visibly disabled” so she must “talk about [her] body everywhere [she] goes.” In this captivating collection of essays Brown explores living with this body; hating it, learning to love it, what she says to her body, what it says to her, where she has taken her body and where she has pushed it to its limits.
Read MoreKatharine Smyth- All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
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“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” Katharine Smyth writes in her biblio-memoir All the Lives We Ever Lived. For Smyth, that book is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and it is the lens with which she views her father’s life and death.
Read MoreRachel Cohen: Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels
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Jane Austen’s novels conjure up images of country ball rooms, empire waist dresses and teatime in the parlor---not grief. Yet Rachel Cohen’s biblio-memoir, Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels, does just that. Cohen looks at the well-loved British novels through the lens of grief, mirroring Cohen’s own in her in the death of her father. Walking through Austen’s work with Cohen, one will wonder why they never looked at this literature in this way before.
Read MorePower Made Perfect in Weakness
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"Marked by the Spirit with that indelible birthmark, as the Priest wanders, he wanders towards God instead of away. Perhaps Graham Graham too felt this relentless pursuit as an agnostic Catholic, felt the pull of a God who will not let you go."
Read MoreJamaica Kincaid's A Small Place
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Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place is a small book of big truths. Kincaid tells the story of the small island of Antigua in the British West Indies; the colonialism that brought them to the place they are in and the difficulties pulling themselves out now that freedom has been attained.
Read MoreMotherhood: A Confession by Natalie Carnes
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What if St. Monica had written Confessions instead of her son? In Motherhood: A Confession author Natalie Carnes responds to St. Augustine’s work. Each of the thirteen chapters of the book center on a theme found in Augustine’s Confessions which is written as a prayer to God.
Read MoreJoan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking
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Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking examines the year after her husband John dies of a heart attack. During this year, not only is she grieving the lost of her husband, but their only daughter is gravely ill. In this year of intense grief, Didion thinks to herself, John might return.
Read MoreJohn Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"
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There is a distinctly American fear; the fear of being average.
Read MoreVirginia Woolf's "I am Christina Rossetti"
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It is not only royalty who are allowed to use the royal “we” when addressing the masses, commoners are allowed too, especially if you are literary royalty such as Virginia Woolf. Woolf uses the royal “we” in her point of view right from the start in her essay, “ I am Christina Rossetti.”
Read MoreBook Review: MFK Fisher's Consider the Oyster
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Yet even without this photograph, I would have had a similar mental picture of MFK Fisher simply by her voice in, Consider the Oyster, her collection of essays on, you guessed it, the subject of oysters. I would have imagined her in pearls with a martini in her hand describing her recipes of oyster- or ---in a plummy diction reminiscent of Martha Stewart before jail, before she became friends with Snoop Dogg and an old Hollywood actress that graced the films for the 30’s or 40’s. Her accent, of course, would be neither British or American in origin, but somewhere that hovers over the Atlantic for those who can afford to spend time in both places frequently enough.
Read MoreBooks For Spiritual Summer Reading List
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My book list for a Spiritual Summer Reads for Catholic News Service.
Read MoreThe Healing Power of a Small, Good Thing
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Curled up with the book one evening, I listened to the sounds of my husband opening drawers and stirring pots in the kitchen. My soon to be 7-year-old, came over for a snuggle. He grasped the book from my hands as he curled into my lap. I had just started the first story and my son read to me in his little voice sounding not unlike a Peanuts character. I stroked his hair as he rubbed his foot against mine.
Read MoreFinding Inspiration #1
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I love sharing where I have been finding inspiration. These posts might become a habit as I share some of the ins and outs of my daily life with you.
Read MoreLetters Sent: Teachers Who Teach More Than The Class
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He called me when he read the letter, telling me that after reading my letter, he could have stopped teaching and would have been content.
Read MoreLost in Books
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My 5-year-old son and I are sitting side by side on the couch reading. I with Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, a book I should have read long ago and he another A-Z Mystery. I have a bag of chips on my left and every few pages he raises his hand out, without speaking for another chip. My 7-year-old is elsewhere in the house, probably in the smallest space between two pieces of furniture, curled up with his own book.
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