Ahhh…Christmas Break. The time when all English professors take a break from grading and lesson plans and meetings and …. read. (Hmmm…maybe we need new hobbies?) At least for me, the kind of reading I do during the three weeks in between the end of our Fall semester and the start of my January session […]
December
23
Lettered Ladies Book Club: My take on Tolstoy, the Purple Chair, and the Act of Reading
posted by Kate Krueger
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch To read one book every day for a year: that is the kind of goal I can get behind. As a professor, I read for hours every day, but those hours are usually scattered upon student papers, historical and theoretical works, and […]
December
12
Hunkering Down with Holiday Picture Books
posted by Laura
Down in our basement, along with the Christmas ornaments and tree skirt and advent calendars and various other household decorations, we keep a very special box labeled “Christmas Books.” A while back, I decided that this stash would go away for eleven months of the year so that come December, these books would feel fresh […]
Just the kind of “list” that works for an nerdy English professor…
posted by Stacy
It’s Finals Week. And it’s 10 degrees. Holiday planning stress is upon me. Therefore, I’m falling captive to all kinds of distractions, including those on social media. Here’s the latest I found on Facebook – and it’s perfect for all of us Lettered Ladies (and Gents). What are your “significant” books, friends? (I included short […]
November
30
What Ann’s Reading Now: My Little House Project
posted by Ann
The odd thing about following a passion to graduate school is that at some point you realize your deepest love has become your work. While this seems, and is, ideal, you also begin to lose touch with why it is your passion in the first place. At some point during graduate school, I forgot what […]
November
29
Base and Superstructure in Bringing Up Bébé
posted by Lynne Nugent
I swear, I really do read Serious Literature from time to time. But lately I can’t seem to get enough of well-to-do ladies giving me life tips (hello, Lean In). The latest of this hybrid genre of self-help/memoir/journalism/ gossip/aspirational lifestyle manuals to cross my nightstand is Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers […]
November
25
Lettered Ladies Book Club: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
posted by Stacy
A few months ago – tanned and relaxed from our respective summers and giddy from the fun of our new blog – the Lettered Ladies decided to embark on an adventure together. Though the six of us now live in five different states and see each other only rarely, we knew that we could be […]
November
20
Giddy to Talk Kids’ Books
posted by Laura
As a compulsive book buyer who likes to maintain a relatively uncluttered household, there are few things I love more than getting recommendations about books that will be worthy of taking up prime bookshelf real estate. So when I saw that my local bookstore, Prairie Lights, was hosting a talk about children’s book recommendations, I […]
November
17
When Women Were Birds
posted by Laura
What seems like an age ago, I was in an environmental nonfiction class in which I was assigned Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. A memoir chronicling the rising of Great Salt Lake alongside the disturbing deaths from cancer of several of the women in Williams’s family, including her mother, it is an interrogation, on one […]
November
13
Shakespeare and Comic Books
posted by Stacy
Last week, the BBC Culture website posted an article called “Finding Shakespeare in Thor”; within a few hours, it was reposted by many on my Facebook news feed, including The Folger Shakespeare Library (one of my favorite research libraries for both the nerd-tastic old books and the atmosphere – they serve afternoon tea to the […]
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