I’m not sure why, but my entire family has been missing Reilly very hard this week. Yesterday, I dusted his commemorative dog bowl. His collar had dust on it and when I grabbed the leather lotion and a cloth… I just started crying. When my son came home, he said to me, without me having mentioned a word to him about my feelings, “Mom, I really miss Reilly today for some reason. I’ve been missing him all week.” My husband voiced similar feelings while cooking dinner and fending Mugen off of his pant leg. At one point, he bent down and put an arm around Mugen and said, “I’m used to there being a dog under foot, but you’re supposed to stay on the ground and sniff at the edge of the counter and then sit and wag your tail at me… and then I’m supposed to give you a piece of chicken when Mom’s not looking.”

The look on my husband’s face as he said this was a mix of joy and sadness.… [Read More]

The Morning Freak Out

I don’t normally read non-fic. I was asked by a friend to review David Laskin’s The Long Way Home. I told him up front, “I don’t do history.” and he said, “It’s okay, it’s not dry, boring history. I promise.”

I was pleasantly surprised when I got completely sucked into this book after it arrived here. The Long Way Home, has been a different sort of read for me. I would love to write a fully detailed review for you, but I’m not going to do that.

What I am going to do instead, is point out to you that I read this book from cover to cover inside of a week. I have mulled about what I want to say about it for a couple of weeks since. What I really have to say is very short and to the point: “Laskin’s excellent prose takes a story that could have been very drab and dull and turns it into a very exciting, highly readable experience that turned the head of a hard core explosion lover and made me think that maybe, not all non-fiction is boring.”

I actually haven’t read a non-fiction work that I’ve enjoyed reading as much since I read King Leopold’s Ghost in college.… [Read More]

Book Review: The Long Way Home by David Laskin

I started working on a list of books a while back that I was going to place on a page on this blog for all of my readers to see. It was to be a list of the greatest books I have ever read and it was taking a very long time to compile it because these books all impacted me on a very personal and very deep level. The biggest problem is that a lot of the works that really influenced the way I think aren’t full length novels at all. They’re short stories. These are harder to come by in terms of purchase but I still think it is worth it for you to read them, and for me to talk about them, especially because I really cannot make a list of works that changed the way I think and merely limit that list to novels. And in order to do the list justice, I needed to give the ideas that I had about each individual work time to percolate.… [Read More]

Really Great Stories