Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

Monday, September 7, 2026

Two Hercule Poirot Short Stories by Agatha Christie




Agatha Christie has the distinction of being the only crime writer who created two equally famous and revered characters – Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. I’ve read almost all the novels featuring both amateur sleuths, and I can’t say which character I like most. They’re so completely different; what they have in common is that they share an ability to solve complicated crimes, almost impossible for anyone else in the stories to solve. 

I’ve discovered that I haven’t read many of the short stories featuring the characters (and I don’t think they ever appeared in the same story or novel). But I started stumbling over them – a link, an ad, something – and I know see that Christie did as well with her stories as she did with her novels.

 

Two recent Hercule Poirot stories I’ve read are The Incredible Theft and Problem at Sea.

 

The Incredible Theft was first published in 1937. It’s set in the classic country home of a lord with strong connections to the British Air Ministry. During a weekend gathering of friends and acquaintances, some significant plans for a new bomber are stolen. The problem is that everyone seems to be able to account for where they were when the theft happened. Solution: bring in M. Hercule Poirot, “that finny little foreigner,” to solve the case. And he does in a classic Agatha Christie fashion.

 

Agatha Christie

Problem at Sea
 was first published in 1939. A group of ocean voyagers are in route to Alexandria, Egypt, include M. Poirot. He watches all the conversations and interactions carefully, because something is clearly off. When a woman is found dead in her locked cabin, thee case seems to have no suspects at all; even Poirot heard her calling out, saying she was staying behind while others visited the port. But once again, he employs those “little gray cells” to solve the puzzle.

 

Both stories are approaching 90 years old, but it says something about Christie’s skill that they still sound almost contemporary. Each can be read in under 30 minutes, making them easy, quick entertainment.

 

Related:

“The Lamp” – A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

Two Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The British Evacuation of New York and the Fate of Loyalist Americans – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Over a Century of Willa Cather – Bradley Birzer.

 

Blood on Our Hands – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Stay Organized: Keep Track and Back Up Your Writing – Dean Wesley Smith.

 

Religion & Rhetoric: The Significance of Religion to the Patriot Cause in the American Revolution – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

Monday, August 24, 2026

Two Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie




Agatha Christie wrote a slew of short stories. Many featured her celebrated detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, and a few included her detective duo, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And many were standalones, mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, and even a ghost story or two.  

The woman was a writing machine.


Two of her Jane Marple stories are “The Case of the Perfect Maid” and “The Herb of Death.” Both are vintage Marple. 

 

In “The Case of the Perfect Maid,” the village of St. Mary Mead is buzzing with the news – a maid has been fired by two elderly sisters living together, supposedly on the grounds of theft. Miss Marple’s own maid, a good friend of the fired woman, asks her to “put things right;” there was no way her friend would have stolen anything. And Miss Marple pays a visit, discovering what the rest of the village has learned – a replacement maid has been installed, ad she may be the best maid ever to grace the village. But something is off, and Miss Marple knows it.

 

Agatha Christie

In “The Herb of Death,” a group of weekend guests (including Miss Marple) are gathered together, telling stories. One woman tells the story of a great tragedy, in which a young woman died of poisoning after eating foxglove mistakenly mixed with sage. The odd thing is that no one else at that fatal dinner got sick. So, what happened? Miss Marple quietly beings to piece together what really happened.

 

In her lifetime, Christie became an international institution, writing scores of novels and stories and selling millions of books. One interesting fact: She wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first novel, after a bet with her sister Madge. After rejections by six publishers, it was finally published four years later.

 

These short stories are what we call “cozy mysteries” today. Blood and gore is limited; gn graphic scenes of sex or violence. They are period pieces – and they’re great fun to read and solve along with Miss Marple.

 

Related:

 

“The Lamp” – A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie.

 

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Stack Underflow: Losing the Craft of Coding – Jarett Malouf at The New Atlantis.

 

The Passing of the American Century – Lee Congdon at Modern Age.

 

The 1776 New York Campaign: 250 Years Later – Daniel Welch at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

 

One of the Deadliest Persecutions Against Christians in History – Samuel Sey at Slow to Write.

 

Edith Cavell – Brussels, Dawn, October 12, 1915 – A London Inheritance.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Jon Nappa Imagines the Life of Longfellow


When I was writing my historical novel Brookhaven, I almost stumbled into using the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a literary device. I had recently read three of his epic poems – The Song of HiawathaEvangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. As I child, like virtually every other schoolchild of my generation, I had memorized “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”  

After reading and writing about the three epic poems, I read Cross of Snow, the 2020 biography of Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes. Two years later, I saw the movie “I Heard the Bells,” the story behind Longfellow’s poem that eventually became a popular Christmas carol. And all this while, I kept looking for something that will help me unify a theme for this as-yet-unnamed novel. 

 

The movie might have been the clincher. And I thought, what about Longfellow’s poetry? If I had searched more or better than I did, I might have found the 2017 novel What Longfellow Heard by Jon Nappa

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Late summer – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Nesting Ground – poem by Rachel Lyn Aldreick at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

The Pershing Hotel – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Every Day Poems.

 

Discover Your Favorite: 15 Poems Every Kid Should Know – Jody Lee Collins.

 

Howard’s Trees – poem by Benjamin Myers.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Two Short Story Collections Well Worth Reading




My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provided an outlet for sections that were cut, or exploring ideas that were good in themselves but didn’t fit the larger story. In some cases, they were small spinoffs from that larger story. A few have appeared online; most have not. 

But I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the short form of writing fiction. I’ve written several for the Cultivating Project. Recently, I began participating in a short story writing project, a simple, self-reporting tally every week of stories and word count (more on that next week).

 

I’ve also spent more time reading short story collections. Two recent ones that were well worth the time, more than worth the time, in fact, are Here It Snows in June by Eric Cyr and 13 Short Stories of Longing by Adam Nettesheim


To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.


Some Wednesday Readings

 

Flannery O’Connor’s Hollow Men – Mitchell Kalpakgian at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Great Books for You and for Me – Nadya Williams at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Dante’s Global Vision: Seeing & Being Seen in the Divine Comedy – Peter Kalkavage at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The meaning of Ceuta – Jack Davey at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Drawing Rooms of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

“The Lamp” - A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie


Hercule Poirot? Yes. Miss Jane Marple? Yes. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford? Yes. General mystery stories? Yes. 

Ghost stories? No. Except the answer is really yes.

 

I’ve read a lot of novels and stories by Agatha Christie. The novels wither her trademark and famous detectives. Her thrillers. Her general mysteries without a trademark detective. But I didn’t know she also wrote ghost stories.

 

The Lamp is a ghost story by Agatha Christie.

 

It’s not long, only about 13 pages. It was first published in 1933 in a collection called The Hound of Death. The book was available only in one way – by collecting coupons from the magazine “The Passing Show.” And there it sat, until 1971, when it was published in the United States in a collection called The Golden Ball and Other Stories. In 2013, it was published as a standalone ebook by William Morrow Paperbacks.

 

I was expecting a mystery. Instead, I got a ghost.

 

Agatha Christie in the 1930s

The story is not set in any particular time. It could be anytime between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. The only real clue is that the family is attended by servants, including maids, so that might push it back toward the ninetheenth.

 

A woman is looking for a house for herself, her young son, and her father. She finds one she really likes, but she questions the estate agent closely about why the house has been empty for 19 years. He finally admits that there is a story about a ghost, a boy who was left with servants while his father traveled to London. Unfortunately, the father died there, and it’s said that the little boy wanders through the place, crying.

 

The woman does not believe in ghosts. She buys the house, and the family moves in. And all seems to go well until her son and her father begin to hear noises. And see things. Things will not end the way she expects. For that matter, things will not end like the reader expects.

 

The title comes from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The woman’s elderly father quotes this passage:

 

What Lamp has Destiny to guide

Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?

“A Blind Understanding,” Heaven replied.

 

The story seems odd for a work by Agatha Christie. It also seems a little creepy. You’re not going to see Hercule Poirot using his little gray cells or Miss Marple knitting away listening quietly. Instead, you get the innocent if discerning understanding of childhood and the wisdom of age and how those in between can easily miss what’s really going on.

 

Yes, it’s an Agatha Christie ghost story.

 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“Vivien’s Song,” poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Three Poems for Robinson Jeffers – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

Two Moccasins Tied Together – poem by Emily Patterson at Every Day Poems.

 

Fire in July – poem by Rosa Gilbert at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

“The Dark Road” by Luke Davis


The story starts with a flashback. Detective Inspector Gareth Benedict of the North Wales Police is on a holiday with his wife Heather. And he watches in his horror as his adventure-loving wife is soaring in the sky, paramotoring, until the motor fails, and she falls more than 300 feet into the sea, killed instantly. 

Flash forward seven years, Benedict and his team, based on St. David’s Island, are called to Reno Medical Logistics to investigate the death of one of the company’s financial executives. His body has been found in his office, seated and slumped over his desk. At first, it appears he’s the victim of suicide. But there’s no suicide note, and no explanation for the wound on his head. 

 

And down the investigation trail the police officers go. And it soon becomes clear that there’s nothing straightforward about the case. The man had apparently been investigating unusual activity involving three supply locations in southern France, but it’s unknown what that activity might have been. There’s a connection to the man’s ex-wife, a cafe owner Benedict knows well and who isn’t thrilled to be asked questions. The investigation also develops a sub-theme of romance; if Benedict hasn’t figured it out yet, we have – there’s more than a professional relationship developing with Rachel Griffith-Thomas, his detective sergeant. 

 

Then, in the middle of the investigation, Benedict discovers an unknown and unwanted truth about his dead wife, and it nearly wrecks him and the investigation.

 

Luke Davis

The Dark Road
 is the third DI Gareth Benedict mystery by Luke Davis. It’s both a solid and entertaining police procedural. It’s also a flat-out good story. Davis is an American, but the Gareth Benedict series read like they’ve been written by a lifelong and native Welshman. The place names, the highway directions, and the general sense of these stories seems so Welsh that I have to keep reminding myself that Davis lives in a suburb of St. Louis.

 

Davis teaches at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis and chairs the Bible Department there. He’s also taught at schools in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia. He describes himself as “Presbyterian body, Lutheran heart, Anglican blood, Orthodox spirit,” all of which have served him well in writing the Cameron Ballack mysteries. He has published three Ballack mysteries, Litany of Secrets (2013), The Broken Cross (2015), and A Shattered Peace (2017), and Joel: The Merivalkan Chronicles Book 1 (2017). He blogs at For Grace and Kingdom.

 

The Dark Road is a great story; that’s the simple fact of it. And I’m glad to learn that a fourth one, All Snares of the Enemy, is in the works.

 

Related

 

My review of Tides of Death by Luke H. Davis.

 

My review of Island Games by Luke H. Davis.

 

Redemption: The Church in Ancient Times by Luke H. Davis.

 

Reign: The Church in the Middle Ages by Luke H. Davis.

 

Reform: The Church at the Birth of Protestantism by Luke H. Davis.

 

Renewal: The Church That Expands Outward by Luke H. Davis.


Reading a Novel that Stars Your Hometown
.

 

My review of Litany of Secrets.

 

My review of The Broken Cross.

 

My review of A Shattered Peace.

 

My review of Tough Issues, True Hope by Luke Davis.

 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

An Offering of Breathing Poetry – poem by Rob Jones at Cultivating Oaks Press.

 

Winners and Rankings of the Great American Poetry Competition – Society of Classical Poets.

 

Loneliness and solidarity – Padraig O Tuama on The Dance: Poems by Christian Wiman.

 

The Sun – poem by David Whyte.

 

‘A Poet at the Tower’ and Other Poetry – Michael Paul at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Pink – poem by Carol Berrett at Every Day Poems.

Monday, June 29, 2026

“Unveiled: Women Erased from the Bible” by Shelly Eshkoli


If I were asked to name women in the Bible, my answer would come out rather perfunctory. Other than Eve, my answer would gravitate to the New Testament. Mary. Mary Magdalene. Martha. The woman at the well. Priscilla, friend of Paul. The woman who touched Jesus’s robe. All people from the New Testament. 

I have to think harder about the Old Testament. Then they surface. Sarah. Pharoah’s daughter. Rachel and Leah. Rebecca. There are more. They all have stories, some short and some longer. But there are also women who appear and then almost vanish.

 

Writer Shelly Eshkoli aims to correct that with Unveiled: Women Erased from the Bible. She features 10 women from the Old Testament, some named and some nameless, who appear in the accounts and then almost vanish, or as Eshkoli might say, almost erased.

 

Shelly Eshkoli

The 10 women are Zipporah, the wife of Moses; the daughter of Jephthah in the Book of Judges; Hagar, the maidservant of Sarah; Lot’s wife; Jael, the woman known for a mallet and nail; Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah; Athaliah, the murderous daughter of Jezebel; Esther, the queen of Persia who saved the people of Israel; the Queen of Sheba; and the witch of Endor, consulted by Saul and supposedly summoning the ghost of the prophet Samuel.

 

Eshkoli begins each account with a fictional “scroll,” allowing each woman to tell her story in her own words. Then a solid, well-researched account follows. Eshkoli sifts through history, archaeology. Linguistics, and other sources to draw a picture of each woman and the times in which she lived. What emerges is a nuanced, thoughtful discussion which brings depth to the story of each woman.

 

The author is a well-known and highly regard tour guide and group leader in Jerusalem and the Biblical lands of Israel. She holds an M.A. degree in Biblical Studies and is also a lecturer and teacher, bringing in-depth knowledge of the life and culture of the ancient Near East to her work.

 

Unveiled is an engaging look at 10 women of the Bible we know little about. Eshkoli brings them alive on the page, and we can see the vital role they played in the Bible story.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

America at 250: Teaching with Honesty and Gratitude – Janie Cheaney at Redeemed Reader.

 

The Sad Death of Tabloid English – Christopher Gage at Oxford Sour.

 

The Siege of Basing House – A London Inheritance.

 

Spring Blossoms and Untimely Reflections – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood on Prince Andrei and War and Peace.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Sara Barkat Takes Us into “Otherside”


Until the late 1970s, my reading of science fiction was limited to the stories and novels of Ray BradburyStranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I didn’t have any inherent bias against science fiction; it was more my reading interests were in other directions. 

For some reason, I picked up a paperback edition of Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg. Then I went to the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (published in the 1950s, it may explain American politics of the last decade). Then the novels of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. And Arthur C. Clarke, whose Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s Endremain among my favorite books. But as much as I loved the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, even then I knew how much it was changing science fiction. Fantasy was taking over. 

 

Years passed. Reading interests changed. And then the old memories stirred when I read The Shivering Ground by Sara Barkat. The wonderful graphic version she did of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, was another reminder, even though it’s usually called a horror story. And now she has a new novel, Otherside, which is about as close as you can get to mainstream science fiction as you can.


To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.


Some Tuesday Readings

 

For the Road to Santiago – poem by David Whyte.

 

The Wordless Rose: Ruchard Wilbur’s ‘Advice to a Prophet’ – Alexander Fayne.

 

Veshicular – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

 

Poetry in Prose – Where Love is Born – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Lives upon Lives – poem by Baruch November at Evey Day Poems.

 

“Requiem,” poem by Robert Louis Stevenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Thursday, June 18, 2026

“The Boundless Deep”: Richard Holmes on the Young Tennyson


It’s not exactly a confession, but I have the textbook I used for English in my senior year of high school, England in Literature. It’s not the one I actually used, but a copy I found at a used book fair. And I’ve also held on to the texts from my two courses in English Literature in college – the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1962 and revised in 1968. I’d prefer not to think about how many editions have occurred since then (those recent is 2024). 

I pulled both texts from the shelf recently to see what poems were included from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). I’ve been reading The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes. Holmes cites Tennyson poems I’d never heard of, and I wondered how many of them had been included in those textbooks.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Foxy noses – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“The Frog,” poem by Hillaire Belloc – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Close and Slow: ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Fifty – poem by David Whyte.

 

“To Rosamounde,” poem by Geoffrey Chaucer – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

“The Declaration of Independence” by Bradley Birzer


I was on a multi-day business trip to Washington, D.C. I had a free afternoon, so I walked from the hotel to the National Gallery on the Mall. And then, for reason or reasons unknown, I walked across the street to the National Archives. And there it was – the original Declaration of Independence. 

 

Drafted mostly if not entirely by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is to America what the Magna Carta is to England. The statement of beliefs. The citation of grievances against an unjust ruler (also an English king, no less). The signatures.  

As Bradley Birzer points out in The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, the Declaration is all these things. And it is more. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Prudence vs. Fanaticism: On the American & French Revolutions – Russell Kirk at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The art of translation: On Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard – David Paul at The New Criterion.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

Monday, June 15, 2026

“Restless Dead” by David Gatward


DCI Harry Grimm, somewhat “exiled” from the police force in Bristol to one in Yorkshire. And Yorkshire, even the idea of eating cheese with cake, is growing on Grimm. His team members are noticing the boss introduced as interim is sounding more and more like a local. 

Grimm is also very good at solving cases, tough, difficult, impossible cases. And he’s taken the step of making it permanent.

 

The call comes in. A sheep farmer, inf act the father of one of Grimm’s own team members, is reporting the theft of a prized herd. Since trouble, and cases, never arrives by itself, another case arrives – an elderly couple run off the run, and the wife has been killed.

 

David Gatward

The theft of the sheep will take the police team into barns and an auction yard, while the death of elderly woman will take them deep into a family’s passions and secrets – and possibly a ghost.

 

Restless Dead is the fifth DCI Harry Grimm mystery by British author David Gatward. It’s a bit different from the previous four, with a hint of the supernatural, which will eventually have a natural explanation. Mostly.

 

In addition to the DCI Harry Grimm series, Gatward has published children’s and teen fiction, taught creative writing sessions, worked as an editor, started a small publishing firm, and returned to writing when the COVID pandemic arrived. He grew up in the Cotswold’s and Yorkshire in England (including the town for the setting of Grimm Up North), and he’s also lived in Lincolnshire and the Lake District.

 

The DCI Harry Grimm novels are well-written stories, well thought out and developed with additional aspects added to over the series. They’re good stories, entertaining stories, with regular characters you care about and want to read more about.

 

Related: 

Grimm Up North by David Gatward.

 Best Served Cold by David Gatward

Corpse Road by David Gatward.

Shooting Season by David Gatward.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Revolutionary History: Gordon Wood’s Idea of America – Scott Spillman at The Point.

 

The Walls Have Ears – Mark Rothschild at Accidental Wisdom.

 

Congress Establishes the Board of War and Ordnance – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

The Festival of Britain and the South Bank – 75 Years Later – A London Inheritance.

 

Britain: How the Southport riots broke Starmer’s government – Mike Jones at The Critic Magazine.

Monday, June 8, 2026

“The Sycomore Fig Tree” by Christine Norvell


You can learn a lot from a sycomore fig tree. Ask author Christine Norvell.

The first thing is the spelling of “sycomore.” I had to fight with AutoCorrect (not to mention Google) to keep it from changing the spelling to “sycamore.” Sycamore is the American tree; the British sycamore is actually a maple. The sycomore fig’s official name is Ficus Sycomorus, and it’s native to the Middle East and some parts of Africa. It’s similar to the common fig (Ficus Carica) we know today.

 

It’s also found in the Bible, and that’s the sycomore Norvell writes about in The Sycomore Fig Tree: Biblical Botany & Scriptural Truth. Her starting point is the prophet Amos, who, when told to go prophesy somewhere other than the northern kingdom of Isreal, says, “I was no prophet, nor prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ Now therefore hear the word of the Lord” (ESV). (Yes, I see that the ESV spells it “sycamore.”)

 

It is with Amos that Norvell begins her study. The amazing thing is that she adroitly condenses her research in commentaries, ancient Mediterranean horticulture, archaeology, botany, and the Bible into a compact, readableg work of 120 pages. Her thesis: “How the sycomore fig tree and the tending of all trees parallel our life in Christ and the challenges we face.” What follows is something beautiful.

 

Christine Norvell

She provides a history of the sycomore fig (it was originally native to Israel), explaining how it takes root, tended, harvested and gathered, and pruned, and how caring for tree is a communal function. Amos called himself a herder and dresser of figs, but he worked with other people to do his work. She also goes beyond the sycomore fig and describes the trees she and her family care for on their property. She applies the discussion in each chapter applies to living the Christian life. 

 

Norvell is a freelance writer who’s published on literature, education, music, and the Bible. She received a master’s degree in Humanities from Faulkner University’s Great Books program. She published Till We Have Faces: A Reading Companion in 2020. She’s also written for The Imaginative Conservative, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, Public Discourse, and University Bookman. The Sycomore Fig Tree also includes notes, a bibliography, and a recommended reading list, and Norvell uses numerous photographs and reproductions to illustrate the text. 

 

We can learn from trees, trees like the sycomore fig. We can also learn, as Norvell, did, from the trees in our own yards and parks. The Sycomore Fig Tree also is one of the most engaging Bible studies I’ve read. Amos the herdsman and fig dresser was called to be a prophet, because he had the experience and qualities that were needed.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Phyllis Bray, Artist  and Doreen Fletcher’s New Paintings – Spitalfields Life.

 

Wendell Berry’s Wisdom for Living in Time – Anne Ryan at Plough Magazine.

 

Poor Bastard: Henry Fielding’s Triumphant Tom Jones – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

“free and Independent States”: The 250th Anniversary of the Lee Resolution – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Social Media Is Not for Everyone – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.