If you don't know what a board book is, you just don't spend much time with toddlers.  Toddlers often love to be read to, but can't resist grabbing at the pages and tearing them.  So the solution is books with cardboard covers and pages.  Yes, well loved board books will eventually meet destruction, but it takes a lot longer.  You also may not know ( Read more... )

“You must read this book.”  I can’t remember who said those words to me about Don Piper’s book, “90 Minutes in Heaven.”  But it was enough to drive me to the internet to see what I could find out about the book.

The reviews on Amazon.com were mixed.  The book was evidently the story about a man who died for ninety minutes and then returned from ( Read more... )

When I finish a good book, I always look to see what else the author has written.  This time, I didn't do that.  Instead, I immediately began reading the book again.  It was that good.  There were a lot of rich characters and I wanted to savor them.  As I neared the end the second time, I started thinking about looking up more books by the same ( Read more... )

While I was in Amsterdam, I had a couple of hours where I had to entertain myself, so one of Tom’s friends loaned me the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 
Although, I usually don’t tolerate books with a lot of curse words, this one had an underlying story that made the “words” worth the trouble to ignore.

This book is a ( Read more... )

I love to read children’s books, especially those aimed at the fourth grade and up crowd.  So when I was in Portland recently and my niece loaned me some books from her growing collection of kid’s books, I was thrilled. The two books I am about to describe should not be missed by anyone over the age of ten.

The first book I read was Princess ( Read more... )

Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat

I had read this fifteen or twenty years ago when Tom was in elementary school.  I loved it then.  Recently I picked it up and reread it and was once again thoroughly delighted with the story.  Three Canadian boys adopt two orphaned owls.  The owls are so young that they think the boys are their mothers and ( Read more... )

Every so often late at night I get desperate for something really good to read. I start carefully going over my shelves to see what yet-unread titles I can find. On one such evening I found “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters" by Yvonne Thornton. I recognized it as a book a friend had handed me with a “You must read this” several years ago (maybe ten ( Read more... )

The recently published “Marley and Me” was written by a journalist named John Grogan. Now that I have read the book, I am very sorry I didn’t go to hear the author when he was in town recently. He uses his newspaper columnist skills to produce a beautifully written account of the life of an unforgettable Labrador retriever named Marley ( Read more... )

I have always loved to read, but the type of books that I read has evolved over the years. In my teen and young adult years, I read only fiction. Once I had children, my reading time was limited, so I read only children’s literature and “how to” books. Lately I have been discovering biographies. Not just any biography will do. It must be well ( Read more... )