Our Quiet Growing Time

Englishman Stephen Wraysford is alone in the world. On a business trip to France, he stays with the family of the owner of a local textile mill and quickly becomes infatuated with his lovely and ethereal wife. Stephen and Isabelle begin a heated affair that marks Stephen's life forever, even to the bloody and muddied trenches of World War One. The book begins in 1910 with the adulterous affair between Stephen and Isabelle, but the majority of the book takes place in the trenches in France during the Great War. And this is NOT a love story, no matter what list this may be included on at Goodreads or what it might say in the blurb on the back cover. This is the story of war. Of the enduring toughness of the human spirit and of one man's quest to survive.  Birdsong was unlike any other book I've ever read. It was critically acclaimed when first published in 1993 and boasts many rabid fans, but here's the weird thing: the New York Times described it as "d...

When I studied in Paris during the summer of 2004, I read Ernest Hemingway's beautiful memoir of his life in Paris in the 1920s as an expatriate. One line from A Moveable Feast that I will always remember is from the very last page: "I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." I'm not sure if I've ever read a sadder sentence. The ending of love is always sad, but what is more sad is his yearning tone... as if he really wished that he had always loved only Hadley. So why didn't he? Some books stick with you after you finish them so that it almost seems disrespectful to begin another when the words and the voices from the last one are still living in your head and your heart.* AMF was like that for me, as was The Paris Wife. Going into it, knowing what I did about ole Ernest, my loyalties were with Hadley, the wronged-wife-to-be. Hemingway was, admittedly, and in his own words, a "bastard" and I wholeheartedly agree with his a...

I am a collector of quotations. I used to write them down wherever I found them, onto scraps of paper… old receipts, canceled checks, napkin corners… and compile them into my quotation book later. now i mainly turn down the corners of the pages on which there is a quote i want to remember. the more dog-eared the book, the more beautiful i found it. So imagine my surprise and delight, when in reading Les Miserables, I encountered two quotations that I had noticed years ago, which I found who-knows-where, extricated from the body of the text. And there they were, on pages 389 and 391, in context. “Certain thoughts are like prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.” ~Marius to Cosette “He fell upon the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that birds sing, that the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawn whitens behind the blac...