Author Archives: kara

About kara

We know our letters just fine, and we know our numbers to a certain point, but books were always the realm of four-eyed poindexters with bowler hats and cravats. That’s why it pleases us so that America’s proud illiterates are finally stepping up and pushing back against the crushing tide of education that threatens to swallow us all into its gaping maw of checked facts. Champions of the Ignorantiat will not like it here.

Why I Wanted to be Poor, Sick, Crippled, or Dead.

Posted on January 10, 2014 by kara

Carol Bird, the dying Christmas Swan I really became a bookworm around the age of 8, and the books I read then lodged themselves in my brain forever. Primarily because I read them over and over and over again. Between … Continue reading →

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Girls I Envied in Literature

Posted on January 6, 2014 by kara

Lisalottie from Lisa and Lottie Two nine-year-old girls meet on a summer camp in Bohrlaken on Lake Bohren. Rude Lisa Palfy from Vienna is a tomboy with wild curls. Shy Lottie Horn from Munich is polite and has neat braids. Apart … Continue reading →

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On the Nightstand

Posted on January 5, 2014 by kara

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese, Hardcover, 9780385536820, 320pp.) Publication Date: November 13, 2012  

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Things in Books

Posted on January 5, 2014 by kara

in Little House in the Big Woods, the Ingalls live in rural squalor, at subsistence levels. Ma has a single ornament, a little china woman – a shepherdess –  with a china bonnet, china curls that hang against her china neck, a china … Continue reading →

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Elizabeth Jane Howard

Posted on January 2, 2014 by kara

After a career spanning more than 60 years, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard,  has died at aged 90. Jane (as she was always called) achieved a triumph in her 70s with The Cazalet Chronicle, a highly praised tetralogy of novels … Continue reading →

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On the Nightstand

Posted on January 2, 2014 by kara

Re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith copyright 1943, Harper & Brothers   .

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On the Nightstand

Posted on December 27, 2013 by kara

  The Circle by Dave Eggers (Knopf, Hardcover, 9780385351393, 504pp.) Publication Date: October 8, 2013  

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“Rush Limbaugh Save the Pilgrims”

Posted on December 9, 2013 by kara

The grandchildren of a lot of old coots will have an unwelcome surprise under the Christmas tree this year!  Rush Limbaugh’s demographic is shrinking and he needed to find an audience as gullible as his ditto heads – sorry kids! … Continue reading →

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Posted on December 2, 2013 by kara

Peter Kaplan, the editor of the New York Observer for fifteen years, whose talent and affability helped the publication offer a smart, insider’s view of New York City’s elite, died of cancer on Friday at the age of 59. Kaplan, … Continue reading →

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Book Find.

Posted on November 14, 2013 by kara

bought on abe books By the author of one of my favorite pieces of trash, Chocolates for Breakfast, written by Pamela Moore, an eighteen year old Barnard student, in 1956.. Ms Moore was trumpeted as America’s answer to Françoise Sagan. She published three … Continue reading →

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