Quote de jour
"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little father down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves"
                                                                                                                                                                                                                     ~E.M. Forster

Happy Mother's Day! And special thanks to my own mom whom I inherited my love of reading from.

It's an unusually small pile of reading this week. The Everest has shrunk to a mole hill. it can only mean one thing. I'm writing more than reading and as my Martha Stewart alter ego would say, "It's a good thing."




Joanna Smith Rakoff's debut novel A Fortunate Age is a '90s homage to the '60s coming-of-age in novel The Group by Mary McCarthy.  Just substitute Oberlin for Vassar. Smith Rakoff is both lauded and chastised for doing so.  It's doubtful that I'll have time to finish the book, certainly if this tedious first sentence is any indication of its style.

On a gray October day in 1998, Lillian Roth found herself walking down the stone-floored aisle of temple Emanu-el, clad in a gown of dark ivory satin and flanked by her thin, smiling parents who had flown into new York from Los Angeles a mere seven days earlier, still in shock that their obstreperous daughter was submitting to the ancient rite of marriage.