Author Focus: Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard’s Subject Was the Whole World Robert P. Baird, former member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff, reports on the life and work of Annie Dillard, who died last week.
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Personal
A Canterbury Tale
The penultimate stop on our trip (before disembarkation in London) was Dover in Kent, England. This port city faces France across the Strait of Dover. Although there’s evidence that people lived in the area during the Stone Age and the Iron Age, the port city of Dover blossomed when the Romans made it the center
New Books from Australia’s Blue Mountains
We are traveling again, and this is my first opportunity for a literature-adjacent blog post. This was our fourth visit to Sydney, and we’ve already done just about every excursion available within the city (yes, we’ve climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge). We were in town for a day and a half, and on the first
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The Best Books I Read in 2025
For 2025 I decided to focus on books related to the topic of Life Stories in Literature. As usual, I read mostly fiction, but I also fit in a few nonfiction resources (about various aspects of storytelling) for Nonfiction November. Here, then, is the list, arranged alphabetically by author’s last name: 10 Best Books I
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Nonfiction November
Because I like alliteration, for many years I have conducted my own Nonfiction November reading. It was only recently that I discovered Nonfiction November is actually a thing, with its own prompts and discussion challenges. Last year, for the first time, I participated in the formal program of Nonfiction November. As much as I enjoyed
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6 Degrees of Separation
Today’s starting point is a favorite of mine, the novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. first degree Jeannette Walls’s father had big plans to someday build a glass castle, which she describes in her memoir The Glass Castle. second degree The word castle also figures in the title of The
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In Honor of Punctuation Day
When I was in grad school for the final time, one of my professors removed all the semicolons from the first paper I submitted to her. In high dudgeon, I fired up the word processor and changed them all to periods—not because I agreed with her, but because she had all the power. Since this
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Happy Hobbit Day!
Guess what day it is! It’s September 22nd, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ birthdays, which is now celebrated worldwide as Hobbit Day. Back in 2018, when my husband and I took a trip that included a few days in New Zealand, I hoped we’d get to see the location that Peter Jackson created as the setting
National Book Lovers Day!
Photo by Gunnar Ridderström on Unsplash Yes, it’s our annual special day, National Book Lovers Day! In honor of which, here are some reading suggestions. (Since I’ve been abroad for the past six weeks, these suggestions are heavily travel related.) 12 Literary Cities Every Book Lover Must Visit New Lives in New Lands: 5+ Journeys
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15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin
Looking back at July 2010, I discover that the literary world was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ll focus on two posts from that month: (1) From July 7, 2010: I was gratified to find that the link to the Christian Science Monitor still works.
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