Books and Chocolate

Original 1940 dust jacket cover Like all artists -- all painters, all musicians, all poets, even some of those plodding recorders, the novel...

The cover artwork is a detail from The Morphinist  by Janos Vazary (1930) I'm trying really hard to refrain from buying books, bu...

I love it when I can combine online reading events like the Persephone Readathon with my annual reading challenges. This week was th...

I purchased  School For Love  a couple of years ago after reading and loving Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy. I also purchased the...

So, a couple of months ago I signed up for the most recent Classics Club Spin, in which a random number is assigned to choose your next...

Willa Cather is mostly known for her novels set in the great prairies of middle America, and though I lived in Nebraska for three years...

With less than a month until the end of Adam's 2014 TBR Pile Challenge , I still had three books left to finish.  I nearly gave up ...

Scandalous!! Grace Metalious blew the roof off the image of the quaint New England Town in her 1956 shocker Peyton Place. Ostensibl...

I wish I had the discipline (and the time) to review each and every book I read, as soon as I finish it.  I finished My Name is Asher Lev...

I'm very happy to have finished this book.  Not only is it a book off my own TBR shelves, it's also an NYRB Classic (of which I h...

What if you had a book group and nobody came?  How depressing would that be? Well, I can tell you from first-hand experience, because th...

Sorry for not posting lately, I've worked the last seven days straight and even though I sit in front of a computer a large par...

I first encountered this book at BookPeople in Austin, Texas (probably the world's best independent bookstore). One of the coolest thi...

"The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there."  Another of the best first lines ever.  [I didn't include ...

This is our library's annual selection for The Big Read -- an NEA-sponsored event in which an entire community reads the same book.  The...

Since I'm always on the lookout for an overlooked classic, I was eager to read this book.  It came highly recommended by a friend (the ...