Essay: The serendipity of a used bookstore
What do Virginia Woolf, Robert Heinlein, C. S. Lewis and Douglas Coupland have in common? For me, it's a used bookstore in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where I stopped during a [...]
Book review: “The Stupidest Angel” by Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore’s 2005 novel The Stupidest Angel tells the story of one extremely clueless — albeit extremely powerful — angel who visits the California coastal community of Pine Cove to [...]
Book review: “The Long Season” by Jim Brosnan
Jim Brosnan's books about two years in his life as a baseball player --- The Long Season, published in 1960) and Pennant Race (1962) --- were the first and last [...]
Book review: “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
Talk about Shakespeare’s great King Lear tends to focus on the action of the play and its meaning. A self-satisfied monarch, blind to the consequences of his actions, splits his [...]
Meditation: Haggling with God
In the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray the Our Father. In Genesis, Abraham shows us how to haggle with God. It’s about Sodom and [...]
Book review: “A History of Loneliness” by John Boyne
John Boyne’s 2015 novel A History of Loneliness was a difficult book for me to read, mainly because it deals with the crimes of hundreds of pedophile priests who preyed [...]
Book review: Two very different books about the history of paper — “The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention” by Alexander Monro and “Paper: Paging Through History” by Mark Kurlansky
Two new books about the history of paper — both tell the same story, right? Well, not really, and, in their differences, the books reveal much about the writing and [...]
Book review: Two books about maps — “Cartographic Grounds,” edited by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim, and “Mind the Map,” edited by Antonis Antoniou, Robert Klanten and Sven Ehmann
The stark white-on-black image on the cover of Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, edited by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim, is beautiful and mysterious. Is this Antarctica? Or somewhere [...]
Book review: “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis
I finish C.S. Lewis’ 1952 book Mere Christianity with great sadness, respect and hope. Across more than six decades, Lewis is talking to me and anyone else who will listen [...]
Book review: “Shaking Hands with Death” by Terry Pratchett
Shaking Hands with Death is a very small book, only 59 pages in length, and only 41 of those pages are the words of Terry Pratchett. The rest is taken [...]