Stepping in the Write Direction

Shakespeare The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea is a wonderful book for Shakespeare lovers. It’s practically a Master Class on Acting, and a memoir of Judi’s acting career in Shakespearean plays. It is fascinating, engaging, and flies by in the blink of an eye. I’m using the Kindle edition with Audible narration, and the audio is top drawer.  In his introduction, Brendan O’Hea notes,   “This was never meant to be a book. My plan was to record Judi Dench talking about all the Shakespeare parts she has played and, with her blessing, to offer it to the archive department at Shakespeare’s Globe. But when a friend of her grandson overheard one of our many discussions at her home in Surrey, and was intrigued to know what all the laughter, passion and arguing was about, it made me wonder if these interviews might have a wider appeal.” The narrative is like an extensive interview, each chapter a different play (20 are covered in this book) or related material wit...

It starts with the first sentence “There was someone in the house.” A mom is alone during night’s darkest moments with her two young sleeping children when she hears someone on the steps. Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra, her debut novel, is a thriller, and in this book thrilling starts with the first six words, and continues unrelentingly, deliciously until the end. I did not want to set this book aside for any reason, and read it within a two day period. I hardly highlighted , as I didn’t want to slow the pace. Murders, attempted and completed happen everyday, most often the victim knows the killer. Have you ever met a murderer? How would you know if you had? We cross paths with many on any given day, and sometimes get a bad vibe from an interaction, or an inner voice cries a warning. Would you heed your concerns, or ignore them as did others around you ? If your young children claimed a man was watching them, from their bedside and a nearby maple tree, unable to confirm their stori...

I felt like I was transported in a time machine back to WWII whenever I opened the book We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein. Readers become completely immersed in the characters and invested their lives. One theme involved how children adapted to their new ghetto environment after their previous lives were so abruptly disrupted by Nazis dictating new living arrangements to their government conquests . The children were motivated to bring income into their often destitute families, and could be very creative and smart in doing so. Adults identified as former teachers were encouraged to set up makeshift classrooms for continuing the education of younger residents, as well as being tapped to contribute to a project the ghetto leaders hoped would become an unvarnished record of what went on in the ghetto. The writers met weekly to report on their progress. I loved the idea in this book of having many scribes or writers appointed by ghetto hierarchy to create books filled wit...