![]() ![]() ![]() He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). ![]() Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. ![]()
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![]() Together, they find a safe haven in the local library, inspiration in learning about the plates of John James Audubon’s birds, and a hilarious adventure on a Broadway stage. ![]() As Doug struggles to be more than the “skinny thug” that his teachers and the police think him to be, he finds an unlikely ally in Lil Spicer-a fiery young lady who “smelled like daisies would smell if they were growing in a big field under a clearing sky after a rain.” In Lil, Doug finds the strength to endure an abusive father, the suspicions of a whole town, and the return of his oldest brother, forever scarred, from Vietnam. So begins a coming-of-age masterwork full of equal parts comedy and tragedy from Newbery Honor winner Gary D. ![]() ![]() 2011 National Book Award FinalistAs a fourteen-year-old who just moved to a new town, with no friends and a louse for an older brother, Doug Swieteck has all the stats stacked against him. ![]() ![]() ![]() When and if she chooses a future mate, she wants him to come home for dinner after a regular nine-to-five job and, instead of tempting fate by driving around a track at 185 mph every weekend, she wants him to be at home cutting the grass. Although she still loves the sport, Tamara is determined to never again allow racing to consume every minute of every day. ![]() While the cover led me to expect frequent sex scenes tied together with a weak story line, what I discovered Instead was a fun character-driven romance set among the world of race car driving, highlighted with some great love scenes.Ĭar racing was the center of Tamara Brigg’s world and it called upon her to make a great sacrifice for the sport – giving her husband in death to a car racing accident two years before. ![]() My eyes immediately locked on the, uh, bulging cover and as they continued to drift in that direction, I knew this was one book I would have been too shy to carry to my local bookstore register. When Flat-Out Sexy arrived in my mailbox for review, I eagerly opened the package to begin reading. ![]() ![]() ![]() One of his poetry books is entitled, Nostalgia for 70 because he disliked Jimmy Carter's 55 mph speed limit since he traveled from his home in Bowling Green to the mountains so often to lead workships, give readings, and attend conferences. ![]() He graduated from Berea College, completed a doctorate at Vanderbilt, and taught German at Western Kentucky University throughout his career. His father commuted to work at the Firestone Tire Shop in Asheville. He lived on a farm where his maternal grandparents were tenants of his paternal grandparents. ![]() Jim Wayne grew up in Leicester, North Carolina. "I'm tell you, every day you're leaving/ a place you won't be coming back to ever./ What are you going to leave behind?/ What are you taking with you?/ Don't run off and leave the best part of yourself." This book includes my favorite poem - "The Brier Sermon." Check out these lines from that poem: Jim Wayne Miller (1936-1996) is my favorite poet and one of my favorite people. ![]() ![]() ![]() Think Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in comic form.Īfter students ask me for another one like Into the Woods, I naturally go to a book by the same artist, although this one has a different look. ![]() The whole design of the book has a frantic look, again to build a feeling of dread. The bright vibrant colors, surrounded by thick black outlining for the panels, paired with a frenzied font builds the nightmarish feel of the book. Each story will leave readers with chills and dread. Then he shares the stories that have made him afraid. The book opens with an introduction about a boy who reads, but is afraid of the dark. And while this isn’t the most popular title in my collection, I’d say it’s one of my oft requested: “Do you have more like it?” titles. With comics, I didn’t often have that request for more like it, until I ordered Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods. But I have learned to keep my eyes out on titles that are… well… scary. ![]() This isn’t one of my favorite genres, so I do struggle a bit. One of the most popular genre requests in my library has always been for a scary story. ![]() ![]() It’s not that it’s hard to resist falling in love with the Whitshank family, occasionally fractured and dramatic as they may be, but that it’s almost impossible to not believe, at least while reading the novel, that you just might be a member of the clan.Ī Spool of Blue Thread covers big swathes of the Whitshank family tree, but all roots go back to Abby, wife to Red and mother to Denny, Stem, Amanda, and Jeannie, and grandmother to a mess of little ones. ![]() The author has always excelled at capturing the minutiae of normal life - especially as that applies to the lives of big, sprawling families - and her latest novel is no exception. With her 20th novel (20th!!!!), A Spool of Blue Thread, Tyler continues to sew together stories about the mundane and turn them into something approaching the magical. ![]() ![]() ![]() What I admire most in Rilke's poetry is that his carefully crafted language, particularly in his later works, manages to convey the movements of this otherwise "unsayable" realm and often addresses the issues of finding the proper relationship to it. A Jungian approach understands them to be self-expressions of the inner world in symbolic form, and learning to understand this symbol language brings the realization that the images express inner reality more precisely, subtly and directly than spoken or written language can. A person's dreams serve as the instrumental guide to this process of becoming conscious. ![]() Making people conscious of their own psychic reality, of their inner world, is a fundamental aspect of my work, which is the healing of mental suffering. Rilke's poetry, at least in German, shows an unusual sensitivity to inner experience and to the symbolic processes of the psyche, two things that are important to me in my work as a Jungian analyst. Since a number of English translations already exist (I have read seven of them), the reader deserves a justification for being confronted with yet another one. ![]() Duino Elegies by Rainer-Maria Rilke - IntroductionĪ few words of introduction seem appropriate for a new English translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien, this short sequence of ten poems widely considered to be the century's masterpiece of German lyric poetry. ![]() ![]() Each creature within 10 feet of the spirit (other than you) when it appears must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw against your spell save DC or take 2d6 fire damage. ![]() The spirit appears in an unoccupied space of your choice that you can see within 30 feet of you. As an action, you can expend one use of your Wild Shape feature to summon your wildfire spirit, rather than assuming a beast form. Druid LevelĪt 2nd level, You can summon the primal spirit bound to your soul. If you gain access to a spell that doesn't appear on the Druid Spell List, the spell is nonetheless a druid spell for you. Once you gain access to one of these spells, you always have it prepared, and it doesn't count against the number of spells you can prepare each day. Your link with this spirit grants you access to some spells when you reach certain levels in this class, as shown on the Circle of Wildfire Spells table. When you join this circle at 2nd level, you have formed a bond with a wildfire spirit, a primal being of creation and destruction. ![]() Source: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything Circle Spells ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Savage is a former playboy who now knows what it’s like to get burned, and he’s not quite the man he used to be. ![]() The story follows Savage and Laila, two musicians who feel a gigantic ZAP of attraction when they meet. I’ve fallen out of hate with this couple, and I have high hopes that I’ll fall in love with them in the second installment, because… WOW, what a cliffhanger! That’s a huge part of what ultimately makes this an addictive read, but it took awhile before I saw anything healthy in the dynamic. These are two people who are attracted to crazy, thrive on sexual tension, and act in ways that are self-destructive. lol, I don’t think I can describe it a different way, other than to say that it’s highly volatile. The other issue is that this relationship is…. That’s not the case later on, so I’m glad I stuck around. If this was my first time reading something by this author, I have no doubt that I would’ve abandoned ship early on, because there are just too many people to keep track of. For starters, the first 20% or so includes a LOT of characters from past books. I’m not saying that it’s not well written – it is – but there were definite impediments to my enjoyment in the beginning. ![]() Never has a book been more aptly named, because it took awhile for me to fall out of hate with it. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world¹s toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days-continuing his impressive self-education-and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. But at some point between page three and fifteen-it's page thirteen in Kafka On The Shore-the deceptively placid narrative lifts off, and you find yourself breaking through clouds at a tilt, no longer certain where the plane is headed or if the laws of flight even apply. The opening pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out an airplane window onto tarmac. ![]() |