celebrating books & the literary lifestyle
I just returned from a summer road trip where – thanks to the S.S. Badger – my family visited Michigan and Wisconsin without driving through Chicago, and enjoyed long, sandy beaches and massive water parks during the same vacation. For me, vacation = reading so I can also recommend two books today while reminiscing about my fun travels.
Continue readingAgain I have to thank the University of ILLINOIS alumni book club for introducing me to a book I loved.
Before it was The Glass Hotel by one of my now favorite authors!
My most recent book club read is A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende.
Continue readingI want to share my favorite travel books. These are the books I browse through over and over to plan and dream about vacations.
If you read this blog often you already know that I love planning vacations. And because the actual vacation usually includes driving and/or flying, and relaxing, vacations and BOOKS go so well together.
Related post: My four book vacation.
Most recently I wrote about trips to Jamaica and Memphis.
I love reading travel books, and this is one of my favorite sections in the library; I always have a couple of books borrowed from this section! But these books I’m listing below, I actually own, and I use them again and again.
Continue readingHappy summer, readers!
I want to recommend several books I’ve enjoyed recently and tell you what’s still on my summer reading list!
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Back around the turn of the century (wow!!) I traveled to Memphis often because my hometown BFF lived there. (And she still does, more on this later.)
But I hadn’t been there for about 20 years (again, wow) so I invited myself along while suggesting that my mom finally make her pilgrimage to Graceland.
And by the end of the trip, I found myself to be just as big of an Elvis fan!!
We traveled with Timi’s Tours out of my hometown. You may know from previous posts that I love planning my vacations and obsess over every detail. I will admit, however, there were some nice things about having someone else do all of this for me.
Continue readingI am a huge fan of The Great Gatsby and have read it several times. I also loved the 2013 movie (with Leonardo), and I wrote a post on that several years ago about how I will always consider this movie when thinking of the book.
The copyright on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book expired in 2021 so it is now in the public domain, making it legal for someone to write a different version of it, which Jillian Cantor has done in:
The book I’m recommending today was a slower, thoughtful read for me. I am adding it to the “Newer Classics” list which is where I categorize the epic reads published in the past 20 years (or so).
This book was apparently a national bestseller years ago – or so the cover claims – but I hadn’t heard of it until my Dallas friend who also recommended A Fine Balance (I will always be recovering from that book) recommended it to me.
I don’t have a book review for you (yet) because I’ve been caught up in a slower, epic read that I will hopefully tell you about soon; and I recently spent a lot of my time watching all 10 best picture nominations (yay for CODA!).
Because travel planning is my other hobby besides reading I want to share my experiences and recommendations from a fun trip we took in March to Jamaica.
We went to Kingston and Montego Bay, very different cities, and together they made for a great vacation.
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As if this title wasn’t compelling enough – Paris + Books – this new historical fiction chronicles the history of the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, a literary home to American expatriates and famous writers in the 1920s, focusing on the life of its founder Sylvia Beach.
The book was additionally fascinating to me because it tells how Beach published Ulysses when it was banned in America. (I wrote my master’s thesis on Ulysses.) Very rarely – maybe once before – can I recommend a modern work of historical fiction that is related to the excruciating, yet brilliant book that I studied in detail.
Continue readingThis is an “older” Kristen Hannah book (2011) that is not necessarily my favorite of all her books but it possibly affected me more than any of the others. It is an explosive and emotional work of fiction.
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