Busy Nothings

Last night I started reading Little house on the Prairie out loud with my daughters. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books were my absolute favourite when I was growing up here on a little Island in the Atlantic. I still remember exactly where those books could be found on the shelf in my school library, and probably if pressed I could quote whole passages from my favourite book of all, The Long Winter . Anyhow, I have waited to read them to my daughters, just because I wanted them to be old enough to enjoy them together. The time seems right now, for reasons that will become obvious. Of course, Little house in the Big Woods comes first in the series but I really wanted to focus on the Prairies. Last night I read the first very long chapter, where the Ingalls family packed up their little house in the woods, said goodbye to all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and drove away in that fragile canvas-covered wagon into the unknown. I know it is totally unreasonable,...

Reviewing Man in the Blue Moon by Michael Morris I am still trying to decide what I think of this book, Man in the Blue Moon. I was intrigued by the premise, a desperate woman and her family pinning their hopes on a shipment of what they thought was a valuable grandfather clock, only to open the shipping crate and have a man climb out. I was even more intrigued when I discovered that this particular bit of the tale was actually based on a true yarn told in the author's family. Oh, by the way, it seems terribly appropriate that I was reading this on a weekend that did in fact have a blue moon. An omen? Perhaps. Anyhow, Southern Gothic is the way I would describe Man in the Blue Moon, as it is packed full of tragedy and suffering of every kind, from the no-good loser opium-smoking husband who abandons his family to the moments where that family almost has something good happen to them only to have it wrenched from their desperate fingers. I know life is hard but sometimes I ...