Lori Duff Writes
BOOK REVIEW: A Glimmer of Guile by Mary Patterson Thornburg. A beautifully written fantasy novel that doesn’t demean women. I love reading both science fiction and fantasy, but one thing that irritates me about both genres is that women are usually marginalized, weakened by societal constraints, or put on a pedestal. Women are not usually known…
I had reason to say this today: I wish I smoked. I mean, I don’t really wish I smoked. I cannot bear the smell of cigarette smoke, and I have no interest in a permanent hacking cough, heart disease, or lung or mouth cancer. I just wish I had a vice like smoking that was…
BOOK REVIEW: Neverwhere: A Novel by Neil Gaiman I am a huge Neil Gaiman fan, though I admit to coming later to that game than I should have and I am playing catch up with some of his books. Neverwhere imagines a London in which there is a whole society that exists mostly underground rather…
Decades after the test, how would you do taking SAT Practice Questions? My son took the SAT the other day. He’s only in Seventh Grade, but he took it for the Duke Talent Identification Program. His theory? I’m only in Seventh Grade. I’m not going to study. I want to just see how I do.…
BOOK REVIEW: Jane Austen in Boca: A Novel The premise of this book, written by Paula Marantz Cohen, can best be summed up this way: what if Jane Austen’s Bennett sisters were actual yentes? Yentes here meaning “older, Jewish, gossipy women who like to set people up with other people and talk about each other.”…
I’m afraid to go back to the library. I love the library. Any place that is hushed and full of books is by definition magical. I’m jealous of the people who get to work there. No one yells at anyone in a library. Libraries have that awesome paper and binding-glue smell. Librarians get first…
Book Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson Jenny Lawson’s brain does not work like most of ours, or at least not like the people I run into on a regular basis. And thank goodness for that. This book is a memoir, but it is more like a guided tour of her unique…
I read “Sutton” by J.R. Moehringer a while back. It was one of those books that just showed up in my house one day and knocked around until I read it. I don’t remember how I got it. It was the fictionalized story of the bank robber Willie Sutton, and while the plot didn’t interest…
Pinterest: do you love it or hate it? On the one hand. I don’t really like Pinterest very much. It is full of recipe and craft ideas that seem specifically designed to make me feel like a complete and total loser-slash-slacker who has failed her children in every imaginable way. If all the other women…