Lori Duff Writes
The phrase, “Let Your Freak Flag Fly” has been tumbling around my head for a while. It pops in, unbidden, shouting, commanding, drowning out other, more hesitant phrases. I have decided to make it the theme of 2020. This is 2020. The year of clear vision. The year my first-born son graduates from high school…
When I tell you that “Sleeping Between Giants: Life, If You Could Call It That, With a Terrier” by Dave Jaffe is a funny book, you seriously have to believe me. I started to read it in the lobby of the auditorium while I was waiting for my son’s concert to start. I had to…
It seems like a poor marketing idea for a Chinese restaurant staff to piss off a collection of Jews on Erev Christmas. Let me back up. I live in the notch of the buckle of the Bible Belt, a place where finding fellow tribespeople is no small task. When we find each other we cling…
In nearly every book I have ever read, from classical literature to bodice-ripper romance to biography to history, there is a character, almost always female, who transforms from a quiet, bookish sort into the life of the party. This is true even if it isn’t a love story. She goes from hiding behind cozy, chunky…
False Horizon is the second book in the Seth Walker series by Joseph Reid. The first is Take Off. Seth Walker is a former Air Marshall with a troubled past. All of the books involve airplanes, helicopters, and flight of some kind. This is a page-turning adventure, with lots of gunplay and explosions, detective work,…
Barbara Barth follows up her delightful The Unfaithful Widow with her new book The Unfaithful Widow Ten Years Later: My Life with Dogs and Every Day Magic. In this biography, she describes the first ten years of widowhood, and how she creates a life for herself in the wake of the death of her husband.…
My friend called me the other day. For purposes of this blog, I shall call her Jennifer, mainly because most women my age are named “Jennifer” and I know a lot of people named Jennifer and therefore you cannot narrow down her identity by this name. So Jennifer called me. Jennifer had had enough. Enough…
When I go out to dinner with my friends, it is because I want to talk to my friends live and in person. I don’t want to thumbtype awkward messages via text or have the voice-to-text app garble what I want to say. I don’t want to be on the phone and misread social cues…
As I write this, we are in what is known in the Jewish Community as the “Days of Awe.” Granted, a lot of the Days of Awe are spent with half of our number saying things like, “Aww, man, do we really have to go to temple again? We just went!” But that’s not the…
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton One of my favorite things is when I find a book that is completely unlike one that I have read in the past, which is a tough thing to find. There are only 26 letters in the alphabet and only so many combinations you can make of them into…