I just finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and already I can’t wait to go back and read it again. It is the perfect book for the self -proclaimed “geek” or pop-culture junkie. It’s riddled with references to famous movies, songs, and television shows, especially those from the eighties. Ready Player One is …
I’ve always enjoyed the stories and legends of King Arthur and Camelot, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King brings the story to a whole new level. Broken up into four different sections, it starts with amusing stories of King Arthur’s childhood, moves through the creation of his court and the knights of the …
About a month ago I purchased a Kindle and the first book I read from my summer reading list in that format was Room by Emma Donoghue. The novel is about the life of a young woman who is kidnapped by a sexual predator and kept in a small shed for years. It’s an awful …
Continue reading “Mary Lou Kennedy, Director of Dining & Bookstore Services”
I am currently reading a 1955 first edition of One Man’s India by Arthur Stratton, a Brunswick native, Bowdoin alum (’35) and English professor, and well-known traveler and author of the mid-twentieth century. To cite the dust jacket, the book is a “…personal record of a journey from Darjeeling to the Deccan, reflecting the life …
Continue reading “Mark Fisher, Manager of Environmental Health and Safety”
I just finished reading Yannick Murphy’s new novel, The Call, a bizarre and lovely book narrated by a large animal veterinarian in rural inland New England (the author is from Vermont). When I say “narrated” I mean that the narration is broken up into categories: “The Call” (in which the vet gets called to, for …
Harlan Coben’s Tell No One is a great summer read for those who love murder mystery novels. It tells the story of David Beck, a man still struggling with the loss of his wife who was attacked and brutally killed many years before. However, his whole life is turned upside down when he receives an …
I am currently in the midst of the Cairo Trilogy,(Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) by Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize for Literature 1988). These three novels tell the story of three generations of an Egyptian family during the first half of the twentieth century. In an intensely patriarchal culture and against the political background …
I confess. I “read” audiobooks. My workaday commute from Portland gives me a lot of time for listening. Not only do I feel that I make productive use of the commuting time, but I find that I can catch up on works that seem to keep slipping off the top of my reading list. This …
This work is a non-fiction that reads like an excellent historical novel. It focuses on the experiences of William Dodd and his family during Dodd’s time as the first ambassador to Germany for America during Hitler’s rise to power. Although at first the Americans can feel the enthusiasm for the “New Germany,” several accounts of …
Whether religious or not, it is almost impossible for a person to avoid the story of Adam and Eve. Mark Twain utilizes these two personas in his work The Private Life of Adam and Eve to provide some “insight” into their everyday lives. By laying out the book in the form of a personal journal, …