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.

Catching Up. . . .

The school I attend has an unusual academic schedule. We have the months of February and August off, which means that July has been a manic month of reading and writing papers for me, with no time for updating this blog. But I’m back now, and looking to make up for lost time! Thanks for […]

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book review

“Old Friend from Far Away” by Natalie Goldberg

Introductory Notes Natalie Goldberg grew up on Long Island, New York. She studied Buddhism with a teacher in Minnesota for 17 years. At about the same time that she began her Zen studies she also began writing and painting, and those three activities have coalesced into an active philosophy of living creatively. Natalie Goldberg has

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Book Recommendations: The Books That Changed Your Lives

Book Recommendations: The Books That Changed Your Lives Here’s an interesting post for readers. Late last week the folks at Lifehacker asked readers to post about the books that have changed their lives. In this post they compile the top vote-getters. (Warning: One commenter said that the summaries give away too many plot points about

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Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress) This is a site you’ll definitely want to bookmark. What if you wanted to locate Robert Burton’s masterful 17th century opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy? But wait: You can’t

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Electronic Device Stirs Unease at BookExpo – NYTimes.com

Electronic Device Stirs Unease at BookExpo – NYTimes.com This article discusses the current status of electronic books, with focus on the two most popular ebook readers, Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. The article points out that one advantage of ebooks is that the supplier never runs out of copies.  Scott McClellan’s “What Happened,” the

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“Disturbances in the Field” by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Disturbances in the Field    New York: Counterpoint, 1983    ISBN 1-58243-332-1 Highly Recommended We hear a lot about nutritionally dense foods these days. Foods that are nutritionally dense provide high nutritional value in proportion to the calories they contain; they are the opposite of junk food, which delivers high calories with

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The All-New Notes in the Margin has been uploaded

About an hour ago I took down the old pages of the Notes in the Margin Web site and uploaded an all-new, streamlined version. For now, the Fiction Notes page is sparse, with no linked reviews for many of the books listed. I apologize for that. I’ll be catching up with the fiction reviews bit

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1,000,000+ views!

Sometime recently (probably over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend) Notes in the Margin went over 1,000,000 views. Since I have no idea who the 1,000,000th viewer was, I’ll thank everybody who has visited over the years since this Web site was born. Send all your friends. . .

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Comments Enabled

I have now enabled comments for new posts. When I created this blog I did not enable comments because I did not have the time to moderate them. I still don’t really have the time, but I’m interested in the conversation. Since comments are moderated, it may be a (short) while before you see your

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Troubled book world is going for novel ideas

Troubled book world is going for novel ideas – Los Angeles Times As Book Expo America, the nation’s largest annual book convention, opens today in Los Angeles, innovation — some would say desperation — will be the main order of business. More than 2,000 exhibitors from every facet of the publishing world, nearly 1,000 authors

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