Next to Love

Top Ten Book Club Picks

I’ll admit, I’ve never been good about attending a book group. But I usually follow along, reading each selection in the quiet of my own home. So I’ve never before offered recommendations. If I did, however, I would look for books that have a lot of complexity, so that there will be many angles to approach a discussion about the book. They also have to be memorable–the kind of books you can’t stop thinking about long after you’ve put them down.

August 2011 in Review

August 2011 Stats Books in progress: 6 Books read: 7 Pages read: 2,382 Books reviewed: 6 Posts on book reviewing: 6 (includes features like In My Mailbox, Wordless Wednesday, and Top Ten Tuesday; reading challenges; and news) August was a great month for me–I read several great books that I’m excited about reviewing, and I reviewed several books that I enjoyed a great deal. I loved John McWhorter’s What Language Is and Noelle Hancock’s My Year with Eleanor. And I also enjoyed []

“The Irresistible Henry House” by Lisa Grunwald

Henry House is the practice baby everyone falls in love with. There have been and will be other babies, orphans who stay in the Wilton College Home Economics course for two years each to teach young women how to care for children. The practice house is “a testament to the belief that women could replace the mysteries of child rearing with mastery.”

July 2011 in Review

I started the month of strong in terms of books read, but Sapphire’s The Kid dragged on and George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons tops 1,000 pages–I’m about halfway done with it.

“Next to Love” by Ellen Feldman

Babe, Millie, and Grace have been friends for as long as they can remember. They have their differences—pugnacious Babe grew up in the poor section of town and never met with approval from Grace’s upper-class mother, while sweet Millie dealt with the loss of her parents at a young age. But now, as World War II summons their husbands and boyfriends, the women must come to terms with the reality of an America at war, where romance and joy are replaced with grief and loss and then with strength and wisdom.

My Mailbox: Ellen Feldman, Ned Zeman, and More

I’m back from Indonesia! I’d hoped to have another video about books I received while I was gone, but I lost my voice somewhere in the jungles of Borneo. Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms by Carmela Ciuraru Wow, Ms. Ciuraru, with a tongue-twisting name like that I can see why you’d be interested in pseudonyms! This book looks fascinating, though; the author examines the lives of authors such as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot, “plumbing the creative []