For a couple years, my Baube was the best large print books library patron in Western Washington. Books took flight from locations all across King County and converged at Bellevue’s Lake Hills branch for retrieval by my father. Baube is Yiddish for grandmother, and Yiddish, as for other Jewish people of a certain age, is […]
Category Archives: The Necessity of Reading
My grandchildren live with their parents in the downstairs apartment of our house, which brings me the good fortune of being able to read with them every night. I cherish everything about our evening reading routine: choosing the books, sitting side-by side on the couch with a small head leaning against my shoulder, listening to […]
“Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth 1. Musical Accompaniment Not long ago I went to a silent-reading event at the Colonial-era Loring-Greenough House in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Apart from the whisper of turning pages (I saw no e-readers), attendees sat and read their books […]
To be in a room with dozens of fourth through eighth graders who are about to compete in a state-wide reading quiz bowl is to experience a level of energy and suspense too high to measure. To witness whole teams of bright-eyed kids on the edge of their seats, buzzers in hand, eager to display […]
You can learn a lot about me by furtive browsing of my bookshelves. And for a home as small as mine, I have a lot of them–four custom bookcases plus furniture with shelves. Like the shelf filled with books on India, a place of my dreams, a country I visited in 2007. This shelf holds […]
Think censorship ended with the Banned in Boston days of James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence‘s Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Think again. Censorship–or attempts to censor–are alive and well. Next week is Banned Books Week. Learn more about efforts to protect our freedom on this page (below) from the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week: Celebrating the […]
What do Karen Joy Fowler, Ron Rash, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, Barbara Brown Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Thrity Umrigar, Pat Conroy, and scores of others have in common? They all participated in the Decatur (Georgia) Book Festival this past weekend. The festival claims to be the largest independent book festival in the country. That […]
“Take a book, return a book.” That’s the only rule of the wildly successful grassroots operation responsible for Little Free Libraries popping up in neighborhoods everywhere, including yours. A Little Free Library is nothing more than a weatherproof wooden box, about the size and shape of a dollhouse, mounted on a post near any street, […]
Please click on the blue title to open this post to the blog page. While there isn’t a cure-all for all the problems associated with long car trips, for years I have carried a hardback copy of The World of Pooh in the back pocket of the driver’s seat to help my family withstand such […]
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh. – Doris Lessing In 1976 I was a single mother, aged 26, and […]
Readers Unbound 