Culture Bits: New Year, Screen & Page

JANUARY REFLECTIONS Turning the calendar page into a new year brings to mind the crafting of resolutions, everything from eating a healthier diet to being a kinder person.  January is also a time to pause and reflect on both past and future.  Entering a whole new decade seems a bit momentous, a moment of drama, and 2020 …

Tidy Tidbits: Reading & Film

TIMELY NOVEL The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri Author Lefteri is the child of refugees from Cyprus and once volunteered at a refugee center in Athens.  Her life experiences obviously informed this novel about a refugee couple who flee from war ravaged Syria.  Nuri was a beekeeper, but the war and the death of their young child …

Books, Books, Books: 2019 & 2020

I love books. It’s that simple and consequently, most of my recent Christmas gifts and other purchases were books. Here’s a line-up of books recently  acquired that I’ve added to my ever growing and seldom diminishing book stack. Two of them I have already read. Here, I’ve listed just the fiction titles along with my favorite titles of 2019. A …

Summer Reading Recap: 2019

SUMMER READING  Here is a list of the titles I read this summer. Of these twenty-two titles, seven were on my intended summer reading list.  I started and abandoned American Spy and The Power of the Dog, read one story in Lauren Groff’s Florida, and am more than a quarter of the way into Middlemarch.  It’s a long book and I’m taking it …