Have you ever traveled to a place found in a book you read?
In the past, I’ve gone to a castle that featured prominently in Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman.
More recently, over my summer vacation, I traveled to Three Pines from the Louise Penny books. I saw the bistro/cafe they set up in the lower part of LacBrome Books and the Haskell Free Library and Opera House (photos below).
Well, today’s the day! Louise Penny’s new book, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost has been released! It’s a week earlier than what was on my calendar, so I’ve been holding my breath since last night waiting for the opportunity to download it to my Kindle.
Is there anything that you’ve waited what seemed like a very long time for, and then when it finally happened….
What?
Tell us what happened when the anticipation reached a fever pitch and the moment arrived!
In addition to these most recent books pictured, I am also reading:
Jane Yolen has died. In my recent writing classes I always shared a handout on creativity by Jane Yolen. The way I found out that she died was on Threads from the granddaughter of Owl Moon illustrator John Schoenherr in a beautiful tribute that included some of her memories of the book. It was so sad and yet a beautiful way to have discovered this loss that affects not only the book world but the entire world.
The author of over 400 books in many different genres, Jane will be deeply missed.
Write every day. You don’t have to write about anything specific, but you should exercise your writing muscle constantly.
I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy
I grew up in a Jewish household in a Jewish neighborhood visiting grandmothers and cousins and observing holidays with the typical complaints of a child with too much energy to sit still and do nothing while the parents were at temple. We were often told to quiet it down while all of the kids were doing their best (or not so best) in the temple parking lot. I can still feel the heat on my face that came up from the asphalt even on these early fall days. These were my formative years. I lived this way in Queens, New York until I was ten, almost eleven when we moved to Long Island, which was different as night was to day.
While we moved east, my cousins moved south to Florida, and while we wrote often, we were bereft [th] of each other’s company which had been constant practically since I was born. My grandmother was their aunt, and my Bubbe (great-grandmother) was their grandmother. My new neighborhood was more diverse than Bayside’s Oakland Gardens, although our immediate neighbor was Jewish and he had a mixed accent of Eastern European and the Yiddish language. We traveled into Queens to see my grandmother, and into the Bronx to visit my uncle.
Continue readingTo celebrate, here is a list of five biographers and a few of their recommended books:
And here are three exceptional memoirs:
It’s another World Book Day! There can’t be too many days set aside for reading a good book. Or a new book, an old book,, a tattered, dogeared book.
Continue reading
We’re a couple of days late, but I feel like World Book Day is on my calendar twice, so maybe talking about books throughout the year without an “official holiday” is a good thing, yeah? Can’t have too many books to read, write, or recommend, right?
For this year’s World Book Day, I thought I would talk about the journey of my own book in progress. I am no where near the stage of publication, but I am trying to work diligently to get on track for a more consistent timeline with tangible goals on the calendar and in order to do that, I should reflect back to see where I started and where I’ve come.
I began this venture without having a book goal in mind. I was moving towards a devotion to St. Kateri, and having visited her two shrines in the immediate area, I wanted to visit the shrine in Canada where she died* and is entombed. That exploration led to discovering her actual original burial place which was a few miles away from her tomb, and then with covid interference delaying our visit led to other factors, meetings, and research that eventually led to writing this book.
The main change that influenced the book was deciding on more of a pilgrimage to her final resting place rather than a stop on our vacation. The second was wanting to visit the places/shrines where she actually lived, where her footsteps roamed. I wanted to follow her to these places and envision her there.
Once that began, I thought I’d write about the shrines themselves – something of a travel guide to St. Kateri’s shrines, and that simply ballooned into something much more than that.
I have been privileged to have met with people who know Kateri, who were instrumental in leading to her sainthood, to her people, the Kanien’kéha who still live on the land that her village moved to after her death.
In a few short weeks (Easter Sunday), will be the 350th anniversary of St.Kateri’s baptism right here in New York. To the day! I am so excited to be a part of the shrine community and am looking forward to the Easter Mass to be celebrated there.
That is the gift of this journey for me – visiting Kateri’s homes and getting to know others who feel the way I feel about her and the excitement of continuing forward in this adventure.
Here is a very simple list of my Top 5 books to give, to read, to re-read.
Happy Valentine’s Day and Book Giving Day!
Also check out Richard Osman’s and Bernard Cornwell’s books! All excellent.
Happy Reading!
Fourteen days ago, I started a 100 Day Project. I had no intention when I was setting my goals for 2026 to do something like this. I can usually do about a week in a row, maybe, or one day a week for maybe two months, I will write everyday but I won’t stick with this type of commitment. I’m not sure why. I love to sit down in front of my computer or my Kindle. At the moment, I’ve just finished lunch at Cracker Barrel and this is the third thing I’ve written. I know that part of that is that I’ve started this 100 Day Project. It has really motivated me to write and to write more.
This is also a book rec. A couple of years ago, I read Suleika Jaouad’s memoir Between Two Kingdoms. I had heard of the book through an interview with Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s former band leader, and I thought this book would be fun. The author had leukemia and went through treatment, and reading it was not fun. I am under no illusion that it wasn’t fun for her either. It was an emotional roller coaster. I felt it, obviously not the trauma and debilitating circumstances of cancer, but Suleika’s writing drew me in, and she will draw you in. I think the best writers keep you in suspense. As she told her story, knowing that she must have survived – she wrote the book, she got married – through the book, I still wondered if she was okay. That is the mark of a great writer.
When I saw this book on an email advert from Indigo Book store in Canada, I was intrigued. I recognized her name right away, and when I read the title (without the subtitle), I thought it was fiction. I learned very quickly that it wasn’t. It was a journey, one that I take myself on often but this was a nice guide to take me on that journey through other people’s thoughts, ideas, and inspirations. I borrowed the book from the e-library and started reading.
I have been reading for two weeks now, and the book is due. I gave myself ground rules, and I will share them with you, but there are no real rules until you make them for yourself. They have to work for you or else what’s the point?
In choosing to follow the guides in the book, I soon realized that it can be done in any medium. It is not restrictive to writing, even though that is my vocation. Even if the prompt directs you to write, you should do whatever feels creative to you. Again, for me that’s writing, but I also like to sketch and for one of the past fourteen prompts, there was a mind map activity. I made the mind map. I could have easily listed the items, but the mind map is a visual way of writing. I’ve done that before (and taught them to other writers by the name word webs). There was a ten image prompt that could easily be done with a camera or a sketchbook. I wrote a vignette for ten images in my life, which was very much like a writing prompt i received from my regular writing group about choosing five nouns and writing about them.
If you’re the kind of reader looking for the numbers, I have written every day using the prompts in this book for a total of 6730 words.
That’s an average of about 480 words a day. Not great, but also 480 more a day than I would have done otherwise.
I am still keeping up on my blog writing, on my book writing, on my writing groups prompts, and my work writing.
My rules are simple.
I haven’t decided if I’ll share any of the writing, perhaps in a few more days.
Now that my library loan has expired, I wasted no time in buying my own copy of The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouod. I didn’t want to miss any of the days and I wanted to keep to the 100 days in a row.
If anyone’s interested in joining me on this project, let me know.
Perhaps there’s some way we can work on this together. I’m open to ideas and suggestions.
