Essays And Lessons

Friendkeeping: a Primer

Friendkeeping by Julie Klam is the book you will want to give all your bestest friends, not as a nudge-nudge, hint-hint reminder of what it takes to be a good friend, but rather as a celebration of just how great friends can be. And if they (or you) pick up a few hints on how to be a…

Wonderful Week of Reading

I was on vacation last week and as usual for a beach vacation, I read a lot. Two mysteries, two novels, one epistolary volume, and one non-fiction, all so very different one from the other, and all good.

Understanding Where Great Literature Comes From: Inspiration

Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, by Celia Blue Johnson is explained by its subtitle: “Stories of Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature”. Blue Johnson takes us into the years, weeks, or moments before a great writer put pen…

Spousonomics: Using Economics To Keep Two Together

East and West Meet and Greet

Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions. But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as…

The Beautiful Sound of A Wild Snail Eating

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is an exquisite meditation…

Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia

The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in…

The Ancients Vacationed Here

Shirley Hazzard writes in her introduction to Ancient Shore, a collection of her essays written from and about Naples, that “I wake these mornings in Naples ….realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that….I — like Goethe, like Byron — am living in Italy.” I was looking forward to…

Evolution of Religion

Letter to a Christian Nation is Sam Harris’ follow-up to The End of Faith. It is a provoking plea for all religions to take their place within the pantheon of “myths” and to stand down as political, social, and “scientific” forces in the world. It is time, argues Harris, to stop…