Currently reading
A London Family, 1870-1900: A Trilogy
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
All the Names
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Down the Garden Path
Virtue Betray'd, Or, Anna Bullen
Year of Wonders
Swallows and Amazons
Illusion in java
Sorry To Be So Cheerful
As a 10-year-old, I would read anything I could get my hands on. Living with my grandfather, I discovered one shelf of dusty, forgotten books in one of the bedrooms. The shelf was up near the ceiling, so I had to stand on a bed to reach it. From that shelf, I read everything from Steinbeck to Maugham to, yes, Hildegarde Dolson. As a 5-grader in San Diego, I had no context for this book of humorous essays by a young woman journalist in the 1940s. There was something about it though that I loved because I read it several times and I still remember some of the stories. One was about Duncan Phyfe chairs. I had no idea what those were. Another was about insomnia, and that one I could relate to as I already was suffering from it. The essay was a litany of ways to get to sleep, all of which only served to make Dolson more frantic. In one, you're supposed to count all the e's on a page, but Dolson got a different number each time. Of course, I'm not making it sound funny, but it was. I should pull it out and read it again, now that have have almost 40 more years of perspective behind me.