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A small ocean cruise ship on the water, with green hills and a snow-covered mountain peak in the background.

On Vacation

Today my husband and I embark on a vacation that will take us up the coast of Norway, to Iceland, to Greenland, across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, then down the east coast of North America to New York City. Since we will be at sea most of the time, internet accessibility will be spotty […]

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Background: 3 stacked, closed books; open notebook with pen on top. Text: 15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

Related Post: A look back at the archives reveals that I didn’t publish much content during June 2010. That doesn’t surprise me, since I was concentrating on finishing my dissertation so that I could graduate the following summer. Here’s the single substantive piece for that month, from June 5, 2010: The Psychology of Reading: A

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Background: light oak floor boards. A collage of mass market paperbook covers: Coma by Robin Cook, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin, Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, The Godfather by Mario Puzo. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Text: R.I.P., Mass-Market Paperbacks

What Mass-Market Paperbacks Do You Remember Reading?

Discussion These are some of the many books I remember carrying around and reading in mass-market paperback format. Since my late adolescence and early adulthood (my late teens, 20s, and 30s) coincided with the height of the mass market age, I felt a twinge of nostalgia when I read that mass-market paperbacks will no longer

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Background: 3 stacked, closed books; open notebook with pen on top. Text: 15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

For the first installment of this undertaking, I focus on this post from May 29, 2010: Fictive Worlds and Real Brains: The Psychology of Reading This extended discussion of several articles I had read online is from the year before I received my doctorate in psychology. One of the areas I studied was the psychology

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Women are reclaiming their place in baseball

Many Americans see baseball as a sport for men and softball as a sport for women. It wasn’t always this way in the US – and it isn’t that way in the rest of the world. Source: Women are reclaiming their place in baseball

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Photo: a long shot of a baseball field from seats high above home plate; crowds in stands along left and right sides and across the field behind the fences,

Play Ball!

5 Books About Baseball Feature image (Turner Field, Atlanta, GA) by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash   ’Tis the season! In honor of opening day, here are five books (2 novels and 3 works of nonfiction) about the boys of summer and the game they play.  What books would you add to this list? Play Ball:

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Background: 3 stacked, closed books; open notebook with pen on top. Text: Reading Notes: January

Reading Notes: January

Here’s the first entry in my effort to do better this year in documenting the books I read each month. I read (well, listened to the audiobook) and reviewed Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I also read The Last Russian Doll by Kristen Loesch for my book club meeting in February. I’m going to wait until

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Discussion

2025: Another Year of Unplanned Reading

Just about a year ago I wrote what Notes in the Margin would be up to during 2024. Now, I’m happy with the way last year’s reading turned out, particularly how I ended the year with a sense of accomplishment rather than anxiety and disappointment. Therefore, I’m going to use the same approach to reading

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Collage of book covers. Orbital by Samantha Harvey; A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles; Silas Marner by George Eliot; The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy; The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett; Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell; Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton

6 Degrees of Separation

Our starting book this month is the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I’ve just started reading it. first degree The characters in Orbital are astronauts in a spacecraft circling the earth. Their perspective on the world is different than usual, as if they had zoomed out on a photograph. For Count Alexander Rostov,

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Interior of a spaceship with a metallic robot looking at a hologram of a human. Text: National Science Fiction Day

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from “Star Trek”

Here in the U.S. today is national science fiction day, observed annually in honor of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who was born on January 2, 1920. I didn’t read science fiction as a teenager or young adult. To the best of my recollection, I discovered science fiction through television rather than books. My introduction

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