Covid-19 (and my own laziness) has interrupted my travelogue of last September’s UK adventures.  I’d been a week on Islay in Scotland, then drove with my cousins in Somerset to Morvah, Cornwall.  It seems a very long time ago and it has done me good to revisit my journal and remember. Here is installment thirteen:  Read the Rest…

My new Little Free Library is open for business! I’ve wanted one of these charming things forever and I finally sprung for one. I got the least expensive preassembled one I could find. I painted it the same color as my house and did as much of the hardware as I could figure out. I  Read the Rest…

(This is the final entry in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.) The third week of June was a strange time to be in London.  Brexit was approaching its vote.  A beloved MP, Jo Cox, a strong advocate of immigration, had been assassinated outside her constituency office in Yorkshire.  The country was  Read the Rest…

(This is the twelfth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.) I’ve wanted to see Canterbury Cathedral for as long as I can remember.  Never more so than after I read The Canterbury Tales a few summers’ ago.  It was on the itinerary for Wednesday but I almost didn’t go.   There were  Read the Rest…

(This the eleventh in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.) London is my favorite city in the whole world but I ached on the way to the train station.  I had loved not feeling (completely) like a tourist.  Wendy, Sue and I had gotten on well together and I felt a lot  Read the Rest…

I am almost finished with my Dickens Project.  Fourteen novels down and one more to go. I stalled a little at the prospect of Dombey and Son because no one seems to like it or to think it’s much good.  Surprise!  It was a sleeper.  I loved it.  It’s a glorious gush of a soap  Read the Rest…

It’s difficult to choose a “favorite” Dickens novel. What I can say is that I’ve read Bleak House three times. It begins with the fog surrounding the Chancery law courts: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among tiers of  Read the Rest…

I had an odd relation to this novel. In the beginning I liked it more than I did when I’ve tried to read it before. Then I thought it stupid. Then the character Sam Weller appeared and I kept reading just to see what he would say next. Then the narrative got tiresome. I took  Read the Rest…

I almost wet myself the first time I read the denouement of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities and I still love the pacing and tension between the comic and the terrifying in that scene. This book is an old favorite, and one nurtured by a beloved high school English teacher. I can  Read the Rest…

My Little Dorrit story begins months before I ever launched myself on my current Summer of Dickens project. I was browsing in the library to see if there was a book on tape not by an author whose paperbacks could insulate a McMansion. I saw Little Dorrit. “Oh. Little Dorrit. I’ll try that.” There were  Read the Rest…