Why is it that poetry can strike fear into the heart of even the most avid reader? I speak from experience. That fear nearly delayed my college graduation when my adviser discovered that I was still shy of a required 300-level poetry class. I was actually well aware that I was missing the class but,…
“Does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.” The Glass Hotel begins dramatically in 2018 as Vincent is falling from a shipping vessel into the ocean. The novel flips back and forth in time…
Did you know that newly released books, including ebooks, come out on Tuesdays? Every Tuesday morning I order the new fiction ebooks for Cook Memorial Public Library District’s Overdrive (Libby) and Cloud Library services. If you are an ebook user, you’ve probably noticed that the new titles often are quickly checked out. So if you…
An old church deacon nicknamed “Sportcoat’’ is having a rough time in his golden years. He doesn’t remember shooting a young local drug dealer in the face. He keeps having fierce arguments with his wife Hettie, who died two years ago. He can’t find his church’s Christmas box filled with parishioners’ donations. Now his best…
I enjoy a good historical fiction novel so, as you can imagine, I’ve read more than my fair share of books about war or countries that were occupied by foreign powers during times of conflict. And many of those stories, usually the ones that affected me the most profoundly, were told from the viewpoint of…
