The Perfect Cuppa

The Perfect Cuppa

My day just isn’t complete without a cup of tea. Okay—several cups of tea. Well, let’s just go ahead and make it several pots of tea. I pretty much drink it all day long. There’s the morning charge of Yorkshire Tea in my darling brown betty pot. Then the mid-morning elevenses of white or green,…

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is one of those books that was just meant to be read aloud. Literally. Dickens considered himself the novelist of the common man and his works were originally published in the relatively inexpensive serialized form. I heard that in nineteenth century England, whole neighborhoods would go in together to…

Living with Books

Living with Books

“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” -Henry Ward Beecher They are piled artfully on the desk. They mount to the lampshade on the bedside table. They wobble in stacks as precarious as a loose boulder jutting over a snowy mountainscape. Oh, yes. And they…

Summer Reads

Summer Reads

There are some books that you just can’t read in the summer. Last winter, Philip and I whiled away the better part of the January and February evenings with Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, settling in by the fireside at the end of a long day and losing ourselves amid the intrigues and adventures of a…

The End.

The End.