Recommended Reading

I still miss Laurie Colwin.

Christmas, 1992. We ate a spiced beef roast that I had cured with juniper, allspice and salt for two weeks and a Country Christmas Cake, a heavy, dark fruitcake swathed in marzipan that had been aging since October. I’m sure they were wonderful, but I can’t quite remember how…

In 1997, the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 greatest American films. The Searchers ranked 96th. This was a scandal.

It is the greatest John Wayne movie, and the greatest Western ever, which means, necessarily, that…

“It’s a good thing she’s dead.”

It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”

I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my…

I have never seen such a wonderful elephant.

I can’t stop looking at the photograph on the cover of A Shadow Falls (2009), the…