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.

On Novels and Novelists

Annie Proulx, Downton Abbey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Franzen, Toni Morrison, Alan Bradley, David Mitchell

Annie Proulx regrets writing Brokeback Mountain? She needs to let it go “I wish I’d never written the story,” Proulx told the Paris Review. “It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out … So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave […]

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The Classics Club

Classics Club Spin #8: “Revolutionary Road”

Related Post: CLASSICS CLUB SPIN #8 Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road Original publication date: 1961 Rpt. Random House, 2008 eISBN 978–0–307–45627–4 This novel is most often described as an anti-suburban tract, a condemnation of the life of conformity and veiled unhappiness that flourished in the U.S. after World War II. And it is that. But it’s

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woman reading

Why I’ll Continue to be a Slow Reader

Goodreads has just asked me to declare my personal reading challenge for 2015. Last year I chose 40 books as my goal and managed to read 43. Yet I see other people who plan—and in past years have managed—to read 100 books or more in a year. What’s wrong with me? I could give up

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woman reading

The Best Books I Read in 2014

I read 43 books this year, for a grand total of 12,695 pages. The longest was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weighs in at 771 pages. Here, listed alphabetically by author, are the 10 best: Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life Fergus, Jim. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd French, Tana. Faithful Place

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Remembering Those We Lost in 2014

Preparing this list is my least favorite task of the year. Here are the people from the writing and publishing worlds whom we lost during 2014, including, where available, a link to an obituary and date of death. Elizabeth Jane Howard 1/2 Tom Rosenthal Amiri Baraka 1/9 Juan Gelman 1/14 Leslie Lee 1/20 Jose Emilio

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Best Books 2014

There Are Way Too Many ‘Best Of 2014′ Lists If you despair over working your way through all these lists, just take a look at Hayley Munguia’s distillation: I set about compiling lists of the best books, movies and TV shows of 2014 in prominent national publications.1 My colleague Andrew Flowers helped me run the

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Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf

In books by soldiers and reporters about Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s the details that slam home a sense of what the wars were like on the front lines: a suicide bomber’s head pulled from the rubble of the mosque he’d bombed; the sonogram of an unborn child found among a soldier’s remains; a bomb technician

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On Novels and Novelists

Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Norman Mailer, J.K. Rowling, Robert Galbraith, Horace Walpole

Guns, gay marriage and a real-life murder: The private life of thriller writer Patricia Cornwell Patricia Cornwell’s insecurities are rooted in a life story that reads like an over-ripe work of fiction. Married to neuroscientist Staci Gruber Cornwell is more grounded these days The Henry Ford of Books The planet’s best-selling author since 2001, James

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bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

On Active Reading

Related Post: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF READING: A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY If you watch HBO’s drama The Newsroom, you’ve seen the introductory clip in which an editor scans a printed story by running her hand quickly down the page. While this is an appropriate, even necessary, reading method for keeping up with a daunting amount of news

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Personal Challenge: A Blog Post a Day in 2015

I woke up a couple of days ago with this thought: I should challenge myself to write a blog post every day during 2015. I dismissed this thought right away because such a huge commitment seems like setting myself up for failure. Why not just commit to writing a post a day for the month

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