Title Oh William! Author Elizabeth Strout Copyright 2021 Type Fiction Purchase/View Amazon Finished Reading December 10, 2021 Rating ★★★★ This is Elizabeth Strout’s third book centered on Lucy Barton. First was a book of short stories: My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), followed by Anything is Possible (2017), and now Oh, William (2021). In this… Continue reading Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Month: December 2021
Classic Spaghetti Amatriciana
Linda and a friend went to Italy for three months this past fall. When they returned they brought a wheel of pecorino romano cheese – and they gave us a nice hunk. Much better than “My sister-in-law went to Italy and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
A Christmas Carol – The Passage of Time Problem
I read this wonderful little book every couple of years in the run up to Christmas. Scrooge’s reclamation never fails to bring me a bit of cheer and hope that things aren’t really as bad as they seem. In 2016 I had the realization that A Christmas Carol is a classic hero journey (as described by Joseph Campbell). I’ve always been troubled by the passage of time in this story and decided to pay more attention to that this year and now understand the time problem when set in the hero’s journey framework.
Reading: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Amor Towles’ novel A Gentleman in Moscow is a fantastic novel, so when he published this book I jumped on it. In terms of characters, plot, and setting the two novels could not be more different. Instead of focusing (mostly) on one man living in internal exile in a Moscow hotel for years, Towles’ new novel follows four boys on a journey from a Nebraska farm to Manhattan and then California.
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Hawaii in October
When it looked like the pandemic was slowing – spring of 2021, a group of friends planned to go to Hawaii the following fall. Come October the pandemic was still going but we were all vaccinated and boostered and got safe travel permits to go on the trip.
We all booked cottages at the unfortunately named International Colony Club on Maui.
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