Last December, I set myself what seemed like an easy challenge: each month, I'd read one book from my own shelves. I thought I'd ace this, reading extras, zipping right along- but I'm behind! I read one book from a non-fiction shelf and another from my kids' books shelf. I finished the one book on my Jane Austen shelf that I hadn't read (Love and Friendship, a book of her juvenilia). I got a bit stuck on my April book. I chose a biography of Shakespeare (Will in the World)

When I was young, I would never put a book down without finishing it. I once spent four months plowing through Martin Chuzzlewit when I was trying to read all the Dickens I hadn't read in the 200th anniversary of his birth. (Other people were planning to read all of his work, but I was lazy and gave myself a pass for anything I hadn't already read, and then I chocked on Hard Times and quit. Anyway...) I have in the time since then become a champion giver-upper of books th

Not that we care or anything, but Gen X seems to be the ignored middle child of all the generations. There's no way to make an exhaustive list of books that defined a decade, but I made a list of some of the books that I loved from that decade and some that I want to read. On the PDF attachment, there is a short list of some titles that were really popular but I doubt I'll ever read. I decided to make this list when I was reading The Nineties recently. And here is what I t

Binet, Laurent- Civilizations The premise of this book is a fascinating what-if. It begins with Viking exploration of Canada. A woman, Freydis, broke away from the others and took a ship south. Her crew went far enough to get to the Inca empire. I wished that this section was longer; Freydis was so fierce and determined. And of course, as an American, I was especially interested when she was exploring what would become part of the US. Her crew interacted with several dif