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...

I stopped reading Danger Close Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean by Patrick Byrne 31% into the book just long enough to urge those who appreciated his previous book The Deep Rig to get this new one to read. I was at the part in the book that started “In early February 2016, I met with the two FBI agents again. They brought a third agent, for the following reason. They said that in 2008 a law was passed that made it possible, under certain circumstances, for the Director of…” You’ll have to read the book for more details (I don’t want to rankle the AI surveillance of content for triggers), but this one made my head explode. Some may think this book’s more fable than truth, more fairy tale than actual entanglements with the USG involving diverse covert operations over a lengthy period of time, but remember “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  Byrne is intelligent, discreet, adroitly adaptive and analytical, and has been relied upon by many in the upper echelons of DC elite. His ac...

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a poignant, honest, raw, joyful memoir that deals with being an only child of Korean and American parents growing up in Eugene, Oregon, the struggle to discover who you are in high school and as a young adult, mother daughter issues, family dynamics, an unexpected cancer diagnosis, being a caregiver while dealing with other family and friends involved, claiming your ethnic heritage, and living your own dream. It is a book many can relate to, while learning things about Korean culture and cuisine. I had no expectations about this memoir, but found it a very moving and powerful portrait of this nuclear and extended family.  The high school conflicts between mother and daughter involve Michelle wanting to live her life as a musician, playing music in a group, having tattoos, and a mother who wanted her intelligent daughter to go to college and not end up living as a starving artist. When you’re transitioning from high school and living at home to...

Years ago when I was driving long distance I used to get a number of detective, police procedurals, and Lilian Braun’s The Cat Who series books on CDs from the library to pass the time with while traveling. I started looking for books similar to The Cat Who series after Lilian Braun passed away, and Pork Pie Pandemonium by Steve Higgs, book one in the Albert Smith Culinary Capers, involves a retired detective who travels Britain by rail with his German shepherd ex-police dog Rex Harrison (fired for “having a bad attitude”) in search of entertaining culinary related adventures, that always end up with a murder they need to solve, often causing consternation to local chief constables and detectives.  I regularly read a lot of memoirs, acclaimed literary fiction, highly rated thrillers and mysteries, but I also need books that are fun to read, and this one turned out to have a good mystery story with a lot of humor sprinkled throughout the book, often involving the dog, so it was...

In the book blurb for The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai a question is posed: What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time? I flashed back to the Disney film “Ratatouille,” where the famous curmudgeonly food critic shows up at the rat chef’s restaurant, fully not expecting what he receives. He was instantly transported into his past; upon his first bite of the humble Provence vegetable stew dish, he closed his eyes and as his taste buds absorbed flavors the old man had not experienced since he last sat at his mother’s kitchen table as a boy eating her ratatouille, every detail of those moments crystallized in his mind, the feeling of receiving a favorite dish, thoughtfully prepared by the woman who loved him first, infused him with all the warmth and happiness associated with revisiting that childhood memory, awakened with one lift of his fork.  Visitors to the Kamogawa Food Detectives have similar experiences. Koishi Kamo...