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Dear friends and readers,

What I would have loved to do a few weeks ago when we (the Admiral and I) took our trip to NYC in mid-July to see if we and relatives could put my mother into assisted living was to go to Central Park to the see at least one of the Delacorte productions this summer. As it happened, the theater was dark just that week; it ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

I put the entries I kept in a Vermont diary on my Ellen and Jim have a blog, two. Here I talk of Clary, Ian, Yvette and (sans photo) Caroline.

The pussycats seem really to have missed us. When we first returned, they were the usual off-standish, and who are you, anyway? But very quickly, Clary, the girl pussycat, manifested ( Read more... )

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Dear friends and lovers of reading,

I like to keep this saying in my commonplace list of favorite sayings:  "Some people say that life is the thing, but I much prefer reading." -- Logan Pearsall Smith. And then there's Chantal Thomas's "Aussi triste qe soit un livre, it n'est jamais aussi triste que la vie" [As sad as a book can be, it's never as ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

The world looked so pretty out my window this morning (the trees so heart-stoppingly colored) that I pined because I don't know how to transfer pictures from our camera onto the Net. I consoled myself with sharing the following written talk and memories of shared literary pilgrimages with you.


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Dear friends and readers,

What can I better write about under Reveries under the Sign of Austen than a book which is itself a series of extended brilliant reveries?  Collins's Rambles Beyond Railways, about his walk with a friend (his illustrator) through a place no one goes to, is an informative delightful and serious travel book all at once.  ( Read more... )