“I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then ..That must have been the last grand year for Hundreds Hall… Soon afterwards the Ayreses’ daughter died… My mother died when I was fifteen… Colonel Ayres died… Continue reading

“When I try to find a fitting phrase for the time before the First World War, the years in which I grew up, I think the most accurate would be to call it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our nearly thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed built to last, and the state itself stood as… Continue reading

In June 1974 a Federal judge ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan that the Boston Public School system had been segregating its public schools for years. The remedy was that starting in the fall of 1974 students from white neighborhoods would be bused to attend schools in black neighborhoods and vice versa. The city of Boston… Continue reading

Whistler (2026) is my first time reading Ann Patchett and I went in not knowing what to expect. And let me say the hype surrounding this novel is real. Whistler is going on my top ten list at the end of the year for sure. ​The cover is somewhat misleading. Whistler is not about a… Continue reading

1979 – “What actually happens after a revolution? I could ask, though we’ve answered that too many times already…: class struggle, radical change in the institutions, a dictatorship of the proletariat. But actually, Sohrab and I have just spent the last few days walking around prisons and universities… and actually every program is now full… Continue reading

That Artsy Reader Girl for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday has asked us to choose the book we were reading on August 11 over the past ten years. I’m going to change it a bit to a book I read during the month of August over the past ten years. I can’t find a book… Continue reading

In 2019, a 19-year-old young man by the name of Zac Brettler jumped off the balcony of a London high-rise apartment to his death. At the time it was a story that barely made the news. But the award-winning journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, based on a conversation he had with a friend of Zac’s family,… Continue reading

“Was it a poor decision for Kelly to walk home in the dark? Teenagers routinely make poor decisions. Does that justify them being hurt, or assaulted, or raped? No it does not. A person should be able to walk home, even in the dark, even through an isolated field, and arrive home safely.” – Megan… Continue reading

An American Plague (2003) by Jim Murphy is an award-winning young adult non-fiction book. The subject is the yellow fever epidemic that devastated Philadelphia during the summer and fall of 1793. I knew very little about this historic event, and Jim Murphy does a fine job of telling us what happened, the personalities involved, and… Continue reading

“I sit at my desk …. I can’t just tell jokes any more, I need to tell a story of some sort. Once I have a theme, I will be the sort of comedian who is invited on literary podcasts to talk about my favourite books and asked to host radio documentaries about the Culture… Continue reading