What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.
There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—
The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett
That’s the point, Will. You can’t control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness.
Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!
Mom’s reaction to this chaos isn’t a surprise. No matter how high the bill that she is paying or that Medicare is paying for her, she will say to me or herself: What happens to all the people who can’...
MOM LIKED THE Ritalin. And she found it had a terrific and unexpected side effect—it helped her read. The day she first tried it, she was tired and uncomfortable and having trouble concentrating. She...
It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren'...
I was thinking a lot about loneliness, because we were now reading Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki, which was published in 1914 and was one of fourteen novels Soseki wrote after retiring...
I think it's because it shows that people--or hobbits, as the case may be--can find strength they didn't know they had.
Girls Like Us by the journalist Sheila Weller,
Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
And I’m also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.
Not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In
Not feeling well is no excuse for forgetting that there are other people in the world.
No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob’s death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my famil...
Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. I guess we’re all in it together, she said. And I coul...
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, a young writer originally from Boston who was now living and teaching in New York. Man Gone Down is another big, ambitious novel—about race, the American Dream, father...
Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to the Art of Reading. Lin writes that, the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in hi...
Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.