The other day I rode an escalator to the seventh floor, literature and fiction, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago and felt bliss. It was the second time in as many weeks I'd visited there. This made me happier than I can say because that's more visits to a public library in two weeks than I've made in the entire last decade.For as long as I can remember, I've loved libraries. At five years old, I got my pinkish orange children's card at the Brookfield Public Library. I was so ex...
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Author: admin
The Trouble With Karma
The concept of karma has been around for thousands of years. I confess to having mixed feelings about it. In eastern religions, it refers to the idea that what a person does in past lives and in the present affects the quality of her or his life or perhaps determines certain aspects of it. This concept is summed up in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad statement that whatsoever deed a man does, "that he will reap." A similar sentiment appears in Christian gospels, including in Galatians 6:7: "...whats...
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The Second Mr. de Winter: What If Genders Were Reversed In Rebecca?
My lawyer book group (read more about the lawyer book group here) recently read Daphne Du Maurier’s classic, Rebecca. The book is a suspense/thriller about a young woman who marries a widower whose first wife was lost at sea. After the narrator marries Max de Winter, she becomes mistress of Manderley, a mansion in an isolated area. Roughly twenty years younger than her husband and of a different social class, she feels constantly overshadowed by her predecessor, Rebecca, and nervous around his f...
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Not To Unite But To Divide – Are Religious Disagreements Inevitable?
When I was in junior high, one of my friends had very strict parents. Because I didn't share her Christian denomination (Pentecostal), her parents didn't want her to spend time with me. I decided to join my friend's church youth group. My mom worried about that. When she'd grown up, Catholics were prohibited from attending services at other churches. It was thought that learning too much about other religions would be damaging to their Catholic faith. My mom eventually agreed I could join the yo...
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Live to Work or Work to Live: Thoughts on Work/Life Balance
The other day on a podcast, entrepreneur and author Joanna Penn said something like you only worry about work/life balance when you dislike what you do. This caught my ear. My feelings about how work fits in my life, or how it "should" fit, have changed during the last six months, partly because I've shifted professionally so that most of my work time relates to my thriller writing. Even so, I'm not sure I completely agree with Joanna's comment. During the 14+ years when the majority of my work ...
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Listening to Fiction and Talking with Shiromi Arserio
I'm one of those people who thought I would never read on an electronic device. I love paper books. During the four years I worked full time and attended law school at night, on those rare days I took off from both, I wandered book stores. I scanned titles in all their fabulous and varied fonts, ran my hands over book covers, inhaled the combined smell of paper and ink. So I had a certain amount of sympathy when a friend said she would never buy a Kindle, because there was no problem there that ...
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Are Books Written by Women More Likely to be Labeled “Trash”?
Have you ever heard someone say with an air of apology, “I read trash”? Or has anyone dismissed what you read that way? Once a friend referred to an early Mary Higgins Clark book as trash. If Clark has heard her work called that, I imagine she doesn’t lose sleep over it given that she’s known as the Queen of Suspense, has sold over 100 million books in her lifetime, and receives advances of over $10 million per novel. But the comment made me wonder, what is it that makes one book or author more ...
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War, the Roads, and the Value of Life
Recently I read Unbroken for my women's book group. It made me think about my father, who is pictured below, and it seemed appropriate to write about it on Memorial Day.WWII Naval Aviator Francis G. Lilly with his motherLike Louis Zamperini, whose life Unbroken chronicles, my dad was a WWII naval aviator. Dad tried to join the Army and was turned down because he had flat feet. He was then not only accepted by the Navy, but trained to be a pilot. He enlisted just before the Pearl H...
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Unreliable Narrators Abound in Life, Law, and Fiction
Recently I attended a talk by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. A week later I read The Girl on the Train. Both books are hugely popular and both feature more than one first person narrator who may be unreliable. Which led me to wonder: is that part of why readers enjoyed both books so much? And if so, why?The Encyclopeadia Britannica offers this definition of an unreliable narrator “…one who does not understand the full import of a situation or one who makes incorrect conclusions and assumpti...
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The It’s-Not-Okay-To-Not-Have Children Act
I just finished reading The Children Act by Ian McEwan, this month's selection for my lawyer book group. (More on the lawyer book group here.) The main character is a 59-year-old judge who never chose to have children. At the opening of the book, the marriage is rocky, to say the least, and the judge is troubled by two cases that have come before her in court involving children. One was a set of conjoined twins who would die if not separated, but only one could survive if they were. The other is...
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