Mary Daniels Brown

My mother always insisted that, as soon as I was old enough to sit up, she’d find me in my crib after my nap babbling away, with a Little Golden Book on my lap. I’ve had my nose in a book ever since. I grew up in a small town, with the tiny town library literally in my backyard. As an only child in an unhappy home, I found comfort and companionship in books. As an adult I wanted to be Harry Potter, although I admit I’m more Hermione. My life has been a series of research projects. Reading has taught me that human lives are deliciously messy and that “it’s complicated” isn’t a punchline.

Blog a Day Challenge: January Report

I admit that when I set this challenge up for myself near the end of December, I did so with trepidation: Would I be able to find something to write about EVERY SINGLE DAY? Would I be able to do all the research necessary for each post during a single day? Would I be able […]

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bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Review: “The Girl on the Train,” Paula Hawkins

Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train New York: Penguin Group, 2015 ISBN 978–1–59463–366–9 Rachel rides the same train every day on her commute to and from London, right past the street where she and her husband used to live. She’s still reeling with despair over the failure of her marriage two years earlier. Looking

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Best Snow Day Reads: 19 Page-Turners To Enjoy While Snowed In

Best Snow Day Reads: 19 Page-Turners To Enjoy While Snowed In Read More »

The Classics Club

“Revolutionary Road”: The Film

In an earlier post I reviewed the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, one of the books on my Classics Club list. The book contained some passages that presented Frank Wheeler as a melodramatically theatrical man always concerned about how he appears to others: He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the

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On Novels and Novelists

Sarah Gerard, Dean Koontz, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith

The 10 Best Books Shorter Than 150 Pages Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star, recommends 10 short novels. I’ve got this one bookmarked for next December, when I may be scrambling to complete by personal reading challenge on Goodreads. Dean Koontz on Life, Literature & His New Book ‘Saint Odd’ (INTERVIEW) “I’ve always loved the

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Reading Recommendations

You’ll find a lot of recommended reading on last month’s “Best Books of 2014” round-ups, but if you’re looking for more theme-related material, here are a few lists: Religious Reading From the New York Times: We took the opportunity to ask a few writers to recommend novels with religious themes, preferably lesser known. (If you

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“Books fall open, you fall in.” —David McCord

Related Post: Getting Lost in a Good Book 5 Inspiring Quotes to Wrap Up the Year The Goodreads blog features five book-related quotations to end the year and asks, “Which one speaks to you?” The one that most directly speaks to me is the first one: “Books fall open, you fall in.” —David McCord  

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woman reading

On Reading

The top 10 books about reading A list by Rebecca Mead, author of The Road to Middlemarch: I wasn’t aware of the term “bibliomemoir” until the novelist Joyce Carol Oates used it – or perhaps coined it? – in reviewing my book, The Road to Middlemarch, earlier this year. But it’s a fitting enough label

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Flow

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience HarperCollins, 1990 ISBN 0–06–092043–2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life Basic Books, 1997 ISBN 0–465–02411–4 Athletes talk about being “in the zone.” For musicians, it’s being “in the groove.” Even if you’re not an athlete or a musician, you’ve probably shared the

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bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Getting Lost in a Good Book

Getting Lost in a Good Book: Scientific Research on Reading Have you ever gotten so absorbed in reading a novel that you lost track of time and of what was happening around you—-even, in fact, that there was a world around you outside of the one you were reading about? Most serious readers have had

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