The best books I’ve read this year:

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury. First time I’ve read this an adult. It’s not quite cohesive as a novel, but wallops a double-dose of nostalgia: Bradbury’s for his childhood, and mine, for reconnecting with an old beloved book.

Brooklyn, by… Read full post »

I have a long list of all-time favorite books, but not every book on my list is one I'd recommend to a general audience. Here's a qualified list of ten books I've read as an adult that have stuck with me. All are recommended, depending on your mood. Inspired by Silkstone's… Read full post »

My mom had a copy of Salinger's Nine Stories, a mass market paperback of short stories, sitting among her small collection of tomes about reincarnation and the UFO spirituality of The Chariots of the Gods and hypnosis and hypnosis combined with reincarnation in Seth Speaks and John Fowler's The Colle… Read full post »

The post I would write
tells all about me
falling in love with a dwarf, how
we run off to meet with his crew,
where I make friends with his aged mother
and she tells how her own husband tamed her
and the wanderlust and the wine.

In the middle, we'd make babies and mayhem
as… Read full post »

 My family's version of Baby New Year, 1957. This is my uncle. Love the sofa fabric.

This one might not be from 1957, but it's the same era, and it shows the same wacky spirit of small-town celebrations. My grandfather, with his arms in the air:

… Read full post »

Hey, I hear you don't like lists. Okay. Think of this post more as an extended diary entry. My three loyal readers: I present this to you.

Nefertiti, by Michelle Moran
Historical novel about Nefertiti and her teenaged husband, who within the scope of the novel wreak havoc as they try… Read full post »

Love it or hate it, the list is the perfect starting point for a conversation. As reliable as Christmas itself--fraught with anxiety and yet still packing a walloping dose of hope?-- around this time of year, every web site you can imagine serves up the year-end list. Last year, my OS… Read full post »

Repost. I sent this into OSland on a weekend and very few people saw it. So I'm reposting as I get ready to do my end of the year wrap up of books as I saw them. The caveat, of course, is that this list comes from a stock of books I… Read full post »

It's a given that Oprah is a mighty force. Yesterday, she featured an author  who wrote a memoir 10 years ago, and that same book today is #85 on Amazon. Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss is going strong.

Oprah's new season's been on for several weeks now and I keep waiting… Read full post »

Fall 2009 big books are just around the corner. But before I start thinking about the newest William Boyd, Margaret Atwood, John Irving, or David Mitchell--Dan Brown who?--I want to look back on the books I read between June and last night. There were common themes in many of these titles,… Read full post »

We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an… Read full post »

We saw two movies yesterday, which I secretly thought would be a lot of fun and very decadent. And it was, but that's a lot of sitting, a lot of tolerating the hooting of the audience at Julie and Julia, and a lot of scrunching down and looking up. My neck… Read full post »

There's a very interesting discussion going on on a Broadsheet article about which of the famous mother and daughter are "more interesting people," either Laura Ingalls Wilder or Rose Wilder? The Kate Harding article is ridiculous (why should one woman be "more interesting" [and therefore more valid?… Read full post »

I realized the other day I hadn't written an OS post in several months. That's the way it is with me--I get very enthusiastic for a while and then I get a kind of clutching anxiety about what exactly constitutes an acceptable kind of post and so I write nothing. I… Read full post »

This one-hour adventure sums up the whole enchilada of bookstore economics faltering. 

Mother's Day is tomorrow

I went to the most suburban of the Tattered Cover locations yesterday to buy Mother's Day presents. I picked up pretty notecards for my grandmother, and for my mom, Junot Diaz's The B… Read full post »

Interesting how vehement she was in 1998 for airing & punishing pecadillos, and how vehemently she puports to care for "the good of the country" now by opposing torture prosecutions.

 "Do you respect the president?" The real question is, "Do you think he has any respect for us?"...I think h… Read full post »

Updated post: reordered the entries and changed the title.

This photo is  of my future cooktop island with open side for pots & pans. The pots & pans featured here are not my pots & pans. They belong to the seller, who has the most amazing eye for art collection… Read full post »

I haven't written in a while for a number of non-OS related reasons, the predominate one being that we've been preparing our house to sell and I've had some freelance work (yay) and then for the past five days I've been sick as can be with the same thing you and… Read full post »

If you see Harold and Maude when you're eight or  nine or ten, you laugh at a few of the gags and you perceive some of its suprising depth of feeling. But until you've had your heart broken once or twice, you can't really get it. That's the beauty and joy… Read full post »

This week's episode of Damages, the legal thriller on FX, broke with a sledgehammer the fourth wall between show and viewers with its product endorsement for the Cadillac Escalade, right in the heart of the story.

In one of two blatant scenes, a side-character is in a car showroom being… Read full post »

NOTE: the name of this post has been changed from The OS Link List: Oh-So-Versatile

You have the power to help promote good OS reader-driven features.

You haven't forgotten about personalizing your own OS link list, have you? A groundswell of OS users who use the link list to disseminate good… Read full post »

We went out to get a used car, birthday surprise, for our soon-to-be 16. So of course we didn't want to spend much money. It took hours at four places to find decently aged and priced cars. Finally found one, finally dickered on the price after many dramatic sob stories about… Read full post »

I want to learn how to write grants so that I might turn that skill into a job. A paying job. Which I didn't have while running  the micro press (fun, yes, lucrative at all, no).

My question is: If you are a grant writer, did you take formal… Read full post »

Sometimes I don't have anything profound to cough up. But I saw this and thought you might like it. Magical and hilarious. We thought we were cool.

Tracking Your OS comments

Make OS posts more pretty with CSS (easy)

Building an OS link list

Making the OS cover: A Primer… Read full post »