Gifts from God; we think of them as rare and exceptional yet everyone has them. “Your gift or talent is there from the start and either lived up to or lost” so says the late, great author David Foster Wallace. The trick is to know your gift and treat it as rare and exceptional by […]
Dagger Book Club: “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture” By David Mamet
I love my son. That is a declarative statement with no interjection of a “however” or “but.” That being said my son is a self-described “Marxist” (wince) and an atheist (obvious cringe while simultaneously making the sign of the cross). How his extreme (and make no mistake when he waxes politically it is extreme), political […]
Dagger Book Club: “Straight Man” by Richard Russo
Tune in to WAMD 970 AM on Thursday, October 20 at 7:30 a.m. to hear Susan Kelly talk about her review of “Straight Man” and more on The Morning Show with Maynard and Cindy Youth is the season of deeds and old age is the season of grace. Unfortunately the transition between the two, the […]
Harford County Book Clubs: Barnes & Noble Classics Book Club
April of 1997 witnessed the first meeting of the Barnes & Noble Classics Book Club. Father Marc Clavier, an Anglican priest employed part-time at the Barnes & Noble Bel Air location, was the originator and leader of the club. His first choice was Jane Austen’s Persuasion. There were probably about six people in attendance that […]
Dagger Book Club: “The Violent Bear It Away” by Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor, born in 1925, was the only child of a well to do family in Savannah, Georgia. When she was young, her father lovingly indulged her creativity and encouraged her story writing and drawings. She showed promise as a cartoonist, thinking from an early age that this would be her vocation. She spent most […]
Dagger Book Club: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
“Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” These words spoken by Hamlet in the Shakespeare play of the same name, are applicable hundreds of years later and brought to life in the novel, Cutting For Stone. This narrative begins with the extreme reactions of three main characters to the birth of twin […]
Dagger Book Club: “I, Claudius” by Robert Graves
The empty space on the shelf between Moby Dick and The Hunchback of Notre Dame was waving at me. It knew I was drowning, and it was beckoning me. Yes, my “shelf of shame”, the parking lot of unread books, knew I had slogged through 300 pages and was betting against me. I tried , […]
Dagger Book Club: “The Shadow of the Wind” – A Gift that was Waiting for Me, and Now It is One of My Treasures
When I was 15 years old, J.D. Salinger introduced me to Holden Caulfield, who was to become my best friend for about three years. I have never really lost my fondness for Holden, even though I outgrew his and my adolescent anxieties years ago. The type of gift I was given between the pages of […]
