Members of the Faith and Fiction Roundtable – a reading and discussion group that I talked about earlier this week – are discussing our first read of 2011 today; if you’ve also read it, or have thoughts on the themes it brings up, we’d love to have you join in on any or all of our blogs: My Friend Amy Linus’s Blanket Tinasbookreviews Bookjourney Roving Reads Books and Movies Book Addiction Word Lily Ignorant Historian […]
I was honestly a bit surprised when my application to join the 2011 Faith and Fiction Roundtable was accepted. After all, Amy has heard me call myself a heathen. But she’s also heard me – sometimes, still – call myself a Catholic, although it’s been a while since I’ve been active in the Church where I was raised. However, I’ve found that you can take the girl out of the Church but you can’t take […]
Thoughts From My Reading is an occasional feature in which I consider my reactions to books beyond the scope of my typical review. It was 1981, and as I neared the end of my high-school career, it was hard for me to fathom that legal equality for women wouldn’t be in place by the end of the decade. Despite side issues like the “unisex bathrooms” debate (which I had with my best friend – I […]
Do you read book reviews in mainstream media – newspapers and magazines, and/or their websites – any more? There actually are some of them still around, despite the rapid disappearance of dedicated book-review sections in newspapers during the last few years. And while many of us seem to be getting book information and recommendations from book blogs and other new sources, traditional review outlets like The New York Times still carry influence and weight – […]
Reading In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church by Gina Welch, which I reviewed yesterday, gave me a lot to think about. Please keep in mind that this is my own subjective reaction based on my understanding of a set of beliefs that I don’t personally embrace, and I may not have all the facts right. If you’d like to correct me on any of those, […]
One thing that surprised me when I began reading more and more book blogs is how many bloggers were regularly talking about books classified as “young adult” – and I wasn’t reading book blogs written by teens (although there are plenty of those around). Most of the readers and bloggers were women – some younger than me, some roughly my contemporaries – and many of them didn’t have tween or teen children of their own. […]
This is turning out to be Polygamy Week around here, what with two book reviews related to the topic (one posted on Monday, the other will be up tomorrow) – and two books with common themes read in near-succession tend to get me thinking. In a review of yet another novel about polygamy, Natasha of Maw Books Blog asked the question, “Should polygamy be legal?” and wondered if the answer might be less obvious than […]
If you would have asked me at 18, I would never have predicted that by the time I was 45, I would have been a mother for over half my life. My son will be 25 this summer, and I’ve lived more of my life with him in it than without – I can’t imagine it otherwise, even if I try. There have been changes in our relationship as he’s grown, of course, and he […]
