Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Summary: A poor New England man, his ailing wife and her orphaned cousin are trapped together. This is a short book, the paperback is around 100 pages and the audiobook was less than four hours,and about 20 or 30 minutes of that was a quick biography of Wharton. In spite of the shortness, I had … Read more

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer
Prodigal Summer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Summary: Three intertwining story lines in a rural Kentucky community

After reading Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior at the end of last year I still wanted more Barbara Kingsolver.  I really do think she is one of the best living novelist and I wanted more.  So I picked up Prodigal Summer because it was on sale for $2.99 on kindle. (Back down to that price)

My wife and I read it together around the time it originally came out.  Of the books I have read by Kingsolver it is the lightest.  Kingsolver likes to deal with heavy subjects.

The main themes of this book are still heavy, the evolutionary process, what it means to survive when it requires others to die to support us, finding a new place as the world changes around you, etc.  But it also is the most traditional romantic story of the Kingsolver books I have read.

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Read More Classics

Christian Smith, Editor of the very fine Englewood Review of Books has an article in the Huffington Post about his desire to focus more on the classics and less on the books of the moment.  He has a pretty broad view of classic (anything that is not a book of the moment) but he is focusing … Read more

Kindle Touch Gets New Software Upgrade

Today Amazon released a new major update to the Kindle Touch software.  (You know the kindle that they stopped supporting when Amazon released the Paperwhite.)  It has many of the best software features of the kindle paperwhite, just without the light and crisper screen. If you have Touch you can wait for it to automatically … Read more