In J. K. Rowlings latest Harry Potter book she makes a hommage to C. S. Lewis (perhaps ever so unconsciously) and the Narnia books in her emphasis on sacrifice in conquering death. Lewis used this as a Christian reference. Pagans believed something similar, but in a slightly different way.
Also, I feel she’s discussing totalitarian regimes of all types…but my brain went straight to the Third Reich.
Barbara Bamberger Scott loved this nonfiction book Don’t Sleep – There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett, a missionary/linguistics expert who lived for 30 years among the Piraha Indians on the Amazon River. The Piraha (emphasis on the last syllable) are not particularly colorful. Their language has very few words (but each verb has 65,000…
The Kindness of the Blind by Wislawa Szymborska (Nobel Prize in Literature 1996) Translated from the Polish by J. Kostkowska A poet is reading to the blind. He did not suspect it was so hard. His voice is breaking. His hands are shaking. He feels that here each sentence is put to the test of…
Jake Lorfing told me a bit about Austin author Frances Nail who “began to write after her 70th birthday. She is 81 now, and her stories enjoy a wide following.” I found this link that tells about a one-woman show “I’m Not the Woman I Was” which is described as “the telling of a story…
My niece Janean Baird is a tigress reader in Illinois. She writes today about the summer reading program at their library. –JGR _____________________ I’m participating in the Adult’s Reading Kid’s Stuff at the library again. I love that I can get prizes for reading this summer too! Also, with children’s literature I can read it…
Welcome to Day Two of “The Van Gogh Blues” book blog tour. Day One began yesterday on Gabrielle Swain’s “Handmaiden,” and there are some good comments building a discussion over there. In “The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path through Depression” Dr. Eric Maisel (pronouced May-ZEL) presents a number of useful tools and concepts….
I chose this excerpt because I feel it shows Ernest Dempsey’s ability to play with ideas. This is only the first page of his short satire, “Imaginative.” –JGR _____________________________________________ Late in the night, Muria heard some unusual noise in the kitchen while taking the only dustbin to the opposite corner of the living room for…