The early days of home computers and video games has always been a particular interest of mine. In fact, it's my stock answer for the "if you had a time machine" question - while I would love to visit all sorts of historical periods, I'd probably fare a bit better…
I'd been hearing about Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic for a long time, about how wonderful and inspiring it was for creatively-driven people. I'd even heard that it was life-changing. And, I admit, when I hear something is life-changing, I tend to shy away. I have a natural distrust of things that…
One of the reasons I love reading Victorian/Regency novels is that I get a glimpse of the everyday rituals, strange to us now, that were so important to the people performing them. One of those rituals that always seemed at once charming and terrifying to me was the obligation of…
As I wrote about last year when I read Ethan Frome, descriptions of meals in books are one of the things that really catch my attention when I'm reading. I like to imagine how all the elements of the meal work together. I read this description recently in Margaret Drabble's The…
Memorial plaques for three of the family members of Plum Johnson, author of the memoir They Left us Everything (check it out at amazon.ca or amazon.com), which I mentioned in a recent entry. I would hesitate to call this "history," but seeing these plaques (I had forgotten they were there, so…
