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There's nothing quite like reading a book with some truly horrific family situations to make you feel like a stellar parent. I don't often read books like this to build up my motherhood self-esteem, since mostly it just makes me sad, but when books are recommended highly enough by people I trust, I do it anyway. Jeannette Walls' book, The Glass Castle, is a memoir of her highly unconventional
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I don't dare say that I've read some books that are remniscient of Jane Austen because I'm afraid that the secret Austen mafia that patrols the internet for blasphemous claims about their idol will hunt me down and sew me into an inescapable corset, doomed to take shallow breaths the rest of my life. Or I'd get some hateful e-mails. So let's just say that I've read a couple of books that aspir
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Every so often I read a book that hits me so hard I know that I will never see the world the same way again. All good literature changes me to some degree, but then there are those special books whose imprint is so strong that I know I will still be thinking about it years from now. Susan Campbell Bartoletti's award-winning Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow is one of those. It wa
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I don't like reading depressing stories, and I don't like writing about them either. Which is why I still haven't reviewed Per Petterson's doom-and-gloom Out Stealing Horses even though it's been months and months since I read it. But I just recently finished three books that all take place during the Great Depression but were fortunately not depressing or difficult to get through. They eac
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I'm a bit obsessed with food, but not in a bad way. It's more like the whole process of making, growing, preparing, and eating food is utterly fascinating to me. I think it's because I discovered food later in life. Yes, I have eaten food my entire life, but I was a terribly picky eater as a child, then became a young adult who found the whole process of preparing food to be tedious and "dom
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Oh my, what a summer I've had. Between preparing for a cross-country move, driving about two thousand miles for a wedding and a vacation, moving 1700 miles away to the East Coast, frantically unpacking and getting ready for school to start, writing reviews of books has been so low on my list it nearly fell off. But I'm back! I'm ready to get caught up and dive into reviews! Instead of decl
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I miss my old book group. They were great at introducing me to new things that I never would have tried otherwise. When I moved, we were getting ready to read Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld. He's the same guy that wrote The Uglies series, which people are always surprised to hear that I haven't read yet so I guess I'd better get on that. Having not read any of his other work, I don't know
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When I was in the fifth grade, I read Ellen Raskin's Figgs and Phantoms. It stood out to me as a breath of fresh air, but I honestly couldn't tell you what it was about except thinking it was funny -- both in the odd and the ha-ha sense. Now that I've read two more of Raskin's novels, I am convinced that I probably didn't get as much out of Figgs as I should have or it would have been more mem
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Back in April, my husband surprised me for my birthday by signing me up for Orson Scott Card's writing class in August. He must have gotten tired of listening to me talk about how someday I wanted to go to his class and decided to take matters into his own hands. Plus, by then we knew we were moving to North Carolina, where the class is taught, so he saw a perfect opportunity to save himself s
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It's been awfully quiet on the RHE front lately, thanks to big moves for both of our families. But even though life's chaos has gotten in the way of blogging, I have been doing a lot of fun summer reading. And I'm betting that after long days spent unpacking, Jenny has likely managed to sneak in some time late at night with a good book. Someday, maybe we'll get to hear what has kept her sane
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