Tag Archives: Books

August 6, 2026 · 6:26 pm

Book Review: Glimpses, Grandfather’s Life During World War II by Stephanie Peirce

A Priceless and Precious Piece of World War II History

I have had the privilege of friendship with the talented poet, Stephanie Peirce for some years now. We met at Goddard College where we were both pursuing our MFAs in creative writing, Stephanie as an aspiring poet and I as a writer of novel length fiction. It was love at first sight (for me anyway!) when I sat in on a poetry group she was in. She was, I fancied, a younger and more talented version of me. We both had the same long, wild mass of hair, though mine was beginning to silver by then and hers was golden. Somehow, though we were on different paths and didn’t see much of each other at school, we began a long distance friendship after graduation, checking in on each other’s writing journey and eventually serving as reader-editors for one another’s manuscripts.

Glimpses is Stephanie’s newest achievement, and it is wonderful! I recommend it heartily, and I am so proud to introduce you to it here.

Glimpses: Grandfather’s Life During World War II | Barnes & Noble®

Glimpses is a slim volume of letters, photos, and commentary that offers precious glimpses into the lives of the author’s paternal grandparents, Catherine “Treenie” Barham Peirce and Chichester “Chit” Tapscott Peirce Jr., who was killed in Germany on February 9, 1945. It tells a compelling story of love and loss, one that is carefully compiled and beautifully rendered. It is an absolute treasure, a gift not only to the memories of Stephanie’s grandparents, but also to the countless lives altered by World War II, and to readers and historians everywhere.

Glimpses will fit perfectly on this shelf!
Stephanie’s first book of poetry, The Bright Dark

Wishing you all ample time to read, to write, to dream and to create–and beautiful friends to share it all with. Love, Lori

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Filed under Authors, Books, Commentary, Nonfiction, Reading, Relationship, The Greatest Generation, Uncategorized, World War II

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March 27, 2026 · 2:35 pm

Books Get Me Through The Great Alone

It’s been two weeks since I left Nevada and one week since I arrived at my new Michigan home. All of these days have been solo; I drove alone, I arrived alone to an empty house, I spend my days here alone. There’s a theme building . . . For now!

The Way In

But husband and kitties will be joining me soon.

The Dreaded Cot (I do not love it)
A Lonely Room (but I love it!)

As an introvert, this hasn’t been particularly tough. I love people, but I also love solitude. I just got the internet yesterday, and that’s fun because now I can write and publish my writing more easily. No TV here yet. No furniture to speak of. I have one little lamp table that fit in my car, a folding camp chair, and a cot. That’s it. Everything else will come in the moving van next week. So, what do I do all day?

I clean and I read. Often, at the same time, by listening to audiobooks using the Libby library App. One of the books I’ve enjoyed so far during this extended period of solitude is aptly The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah. It’s a tough book about a tough time and a tough place, but I liked it. Alaska in the 1970s, mental illness, abuse . . . it’s got it all, but it isn’t only that, of course. It’s also a book filled with nostalgia, love, and the awesomeness of nature.

Other books I read either just prior to moving, during the drive, or since my arrival are: We All Live Here, Moyes; Sandwich, Newman; The Secret Book of Flora Lea, Henry; Remain, Spark and Shyamalan; The Missing Half, Flowers and Kiester; and currently, The Island of Sea Women, See. Each book has its merits.

I found both We All Live Here and Sandwich charming and humorous. Both are light, contemporary novels with women protagonists wrestling with life changing events and the love of family.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea took me to one of my favorite historical settings, World War II England, in the countryside and also to London in the 1960s. It’s a delightful book about sisters, families, love, and the importance of stories.

Remain and The Missing Half are mysteries, with Remain being the more entertaining of the two for me. The Missing Half helped pass the time, but Remain’s ghostly love story captivated me at times, including during several memorable scenes that made me shiver.

And now I’m listening to The Island of Sea Women. It’s taken me to a part of the world I know very little about, which I love, because I am learning so much. It’s set in Korea from the story’s beginning in the 1930s and will move through the war years and take me to the present day. It’s about women sea divers (an amazing group of female divers who earn the money for their families while their husbands care for the children), and it’s the story of two friends Mi-ja and Young-sook.   

As you can see, I’ve not been alone, not really, for I’ve been traveling through time and place along with the characters created by the authors of these varied and appealing novels, carried away by their stories. It’s a kind of magic really, the way a reader lives both inside and outside of a book—simultaneously in the room, and also somewhere else far away.

I love this line about reading from Stephen Chbosky from his young adult novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

“Sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”

Exactly.

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February 17, 2026 · 4:11 pm

Best Offer Wins?

“In his witty and thought-provoking manner, Mark Twain once famously said, ‘It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.’” https://www.socratic-method.com

Sometimes, though, truth is not stranger than fiction. And thankfully, sometimes truth is kinder than fiction, too. Recently a friend and I had both just finished books that bothered us in various ways, which isn’t to say books shouldn’t bother us—it’s quite often important that they do—it was just that in the case of these books, the way we’d been bothered had less to do with subject matter and more to do with the marketing expectation that readers would respond positively to the various dastardly deeds of the protagonists, and that, indeed, there did seem to be plenty of readers out there who backed up that claim—readers who “loved” these books (and so maybe by extension that means they loved the protagonists? Maybe?).

I don’t remember the title of the book my friend was referring to; she said it was something about killers who were in love and only killed bad people—sounded like a Dexter type theme, and I know that was a highly watched television series, so I guess there’s an audience for that. I can’t claim to be someone who is above consuming questionable content. I’ve read hundreds of books in most genres and not all of them have been particularly elevating. That said, I have seldom read a novel with a less likable protagonist than the one Marisa Kashino gives us in Best Offer Wins (With the possible exception of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist/narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).

Best Offer Wins is a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and was published by Celadon Books in 2025. From the book jacket: “…Margo will prove again and again that there’s no boundary she won’t cross to seize the dream life she’s been chasing. The most unsettling part? You’ll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.”

Uh. No. But let me take you back to the reason I read that blurb and took the bait. Coincidentally, on the same day my husband and I were submitting a bid on a house we wanted, Marisa Kashino’s thriller about a woman who will stop at nothing to get her dream house came across my desk at the library. It was a new purchase, and my job was to catalog it and get it ready for patron check-outs. I joked with my realtor that I hoped I wouldn’t become as obsessed with home buying as the teaser on the book jacket hinted the book’s protagonist, Margo, did.

Truth being, in this case anyway, less strange than fiction, I didn’t. Thank goodness. But I did check the book out and take it home to read over the weekend. I’m not normally inspired to write reviews about books I don’t like, but there’s something about this one that pushes me. What that tells me is that I did find it engaging, at least enough to finish it, but that, also, it troubled me. I think I kept reading to see if it would be possible to “root for her even as [I] gasped in disbelief.”

That stage never arrived. The backstory on Margo did indicate she’d had very tough breaks, enough of them, too, and that would normally soften a reader’s judgement and bring her to life in a way that would help the reader to care about her, but Margo’s behavior was so egregious that she remained not only unlikable, but monstrous. And I don’t mean monstrous in the sad way that Frankenstein was a monster because he was a victim and you felt sorry for him. Margo’s kind of monstrous is the carefully calculated kind that lacks any hint of personal responsibility or remorse.

I’m not sure what it says about me that I read the whole book anyway, and that gives me pause. I think perhaps my weird fascination with the book represents a part of contemporary America to me that I don’t understand and cannot accept, but that I still keep trying to fathom. I want people to have homes. I want people to care for each other. I want to love my neighbors as myself.

Each turn of the page offered hope, however slight, that Margo would learn some kind of moral lesson or would offer her a kernal of insight, forgiveness, or redemption, but in the end, there was none. No tenderness. No justice. Just a sad expose of a society where dreams can become as dangerous as despair, and the only thing that matters is the win.

In that way, the book is a success, I guess. A pretty good satire. Excellent social criticism, and social criticism is very much in order these days in my opinion. With Best Offer Wins out of the way, I’m happy to announce that Mr. P and I purchased a delightful home in the beautiful UP—the upper peninsula—in the lovely U.S. state of Michigan. We will be off to a new chapter there soon and leaving the awe-inspiring West and central Nevada behind with love for all we’ve learned and the friendships we treasure. By the way, we accomplished the purchase of the Michigan house without any nefarious activities nor bidding war mayhem.  Sometimes, you see, truth is not stranger than fiction, and sometimes it is kinder.

Wishing you all happy days and cozy nights as we move through February and into March. Be Well!

The Upper Peninsula, Michigan, U.S.

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April 25, 2025 · 4:31 pm

Polished Maple Tables

An early picture of our old house, before renovation.

One of the most enjoyable writing exercises I’ve done lately comes from a biographical poetry template based on a poem by George Ella Lyon. I came across it on Jeannine Quellette’s brilliant Substack, Writing in the Dark. The exercise is familiar to me in a distant way, as though perhaps I’d done it before but lost it. Or perhaps it suited me perfectly this past week because I have been contemplating writing memoir and fictionalized biography, so it seems as though I always had it—a poem about beginnings, and the echoes still heard, the lessons still being learned.

Thank you, Jeannine Quellette, for sharing the lesson! You can visit Jeannine’s website and read her poem, “From Chickweed to Ash,” here: https://writinginthedark.substack.com/p/from-chickweed-and-ash.

Here is my version:

Polished Maple Tables

I am from polished maple tables

From Pall Malls and Folgers

Green grass, Blue water, the whoosh of wind and wings

Flocks of seagulls

I am from Lilies of the Valley, Bleeding Hearts, Lake Michigan’s endless sand and waves

I’m from World War II, Ramblers, and Divorce

From Rachel and Frederick and William and Lorene

From Rae and Bill

I’m from long car rides and listening to albums on the stereo

From Mr. Wonderful and Stop Crying and What did you learn in school today?

I’m from no church, lost pets, and rented houses.

From a mother who scoffed at religious people

And a father who blamed organized religion

For the world’s woes.

But I’m also from Christmas trees and baking cookies, from bunnies and Easter baskets.

And I’m from the hand-written prayers I found in my father’s bedside table when he died.

I’m from Chicago and Kenosha

From Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota

From Scots called Johnstone, and Swedes called Nelson

From ground beef casseroles, navy bean soup, and sour cream raisin pie

From Great Aunt Mary who broke up with her beau when he jumped into a fountain,

Never to wed, who lived with her sister Lorene’s family and then mine until The Divorce when she

Was sent back to Chicago to an old folk’s home

And Mother was hospitalized

I am from women who sewed and worked in libraries

and who cooked and cleaned other people’s houses.

And from men who sought love and adventure and worked on farms and in factories.

I am from Midwestern barefoot summers and sea glass and wandering the West

Restless and yearning for polished maple tables and a place to call home.

                                                                                                             RLP, 2025

If you would like to write your own “I Am From” poem, here is the template. Use it as a springboard. Jump in and adjust it to suit. I hope the writing brings you joy, or something like joy, which is sometimes as simple as finding a way to express the inexpressible past.

Blessings! And please share your poems in the comments!

Kenosha, Wisconsin

                                                          Template: I Am From

I am from ________________ (specific ordinary item)

From ____________ (product name) and _____________ (product name)

____________ (adjective), ______(adjective), _________ (sensory detail)

I am from _____________ (plant, flowers, natural item)

_______________________________________ (description of above item)

I’m from ______________ (family tradition) and _____________ (family trait)

From ___________ (name of family member) and ______________ (another family member)

I’m from the _______________ (description of family tendency) and ________ (another one)

From ______________ (something you were told as a child) and _________ (another)

I’m from __________________ (representation of religion or lack thereof), __________ (further description)

I’m from ___________________ (place of birth and family ancestry)

_______________________ (a food that represents your family), ___________ (another one)

From the ___________ (specific family story about a specific person and detail).

Dad, Lori, and Billy

Early Days in Kenosha

Thanks for visiting! Wishing you all good things. With Love, Lori

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March 8, 2025 · 4:45 pm

Surviving Sue Review and Traces in the Snow

Today in the Reese River Valley. My photo.

Two consecutive snowstorms, and the sun sparks diamonds on the snow-hushed surfaces here in Austin and in the Reese River Valley just below us, giving us time to read, to wander, to cook, and to write.

Walking after a snowstorm is one of my favorite activities, along with walking in a warm rain, or on a starry night, or along a tree-lined lane at the height of autumn. It’s like walking inside a dream, a vision, a movie . . . all of it a magical changing work of art. This has been that kind of a weekend. An appreciated and needed balm for the eyes, ears, heart, mind and soul.

Our footprints going down our driveway last winter after a similar storm in Austin, NV. My photo.

After today’s walk, I finished reading Dr. Vicki Atkinson’s memoir, Surviving Sue: An Inspirational Survivor’s Story About a Daughter and her Life with a Mother Who was Riddled with Alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, Anxiety, Depression, and Munchausen’s. Vicki is a fellow blogger, one I follow and read with pleasure, always knowing I will find something positive, real, and insightful in her posts. Vicki is generous with her readers, sharing of herself, her humor, her highs and lows with an empathic interest in our perspectives.

This is Vicki’s voice, and it shines on the pages of her book. She is a profoundly kind-spirited woman who grew up learning how to turn the injury and injustice of her mother’s mental illness into something bigger than her own pain. With keen intelligence, her father’s and sister’s love, and later through her own family and probably also due to her dedication to her studies, Vicki survives and thrives, and she does it without ever compromising her own values.

Vicki’s Wonderful Memoir

Vicki’s compassion for her mother is more than challenged over the years, but somehow, she stays the course of doing what she believes is best for everyone concerned. For those who don’t know Vicki or haven’t read Surviving Sue, I’d like to stop here to encourage you to read it for yourself. This story is worth your time. It may even affect the ways you view some of your own experiences, past or present. It may soften your heart. It’s a beautiful book, and an engaging read.

Surviving Sue, Eckhartz Press, Chicago. Copyright © 2023. Vicki’s Blog is victoriaponders.com. Vicki also shares a podcast with her friend and colleague, Wynne Leon of Surprised by Joy (Blog). Their podcast, The Heart of the Matter can be found at sharingtheheartofthematter.com.

Now it’s time for the cooking part of the day. I’ve got an eggplant, lots of spices, cheese, pasta, greens, and tomatoes. Oh, and wine.

Should be a beautiful night.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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May 31, 2024 · 4:09 pm

100th Post, a New Library, and Mormon Crickets

Austin, Nevada last week.

Hello readers and writers! It’s a bright and shiny day here in Austin, Nevada. We’re experiencing our first really warm days and our summer activities have begun. I’m told that two high school seniors  graduated yesterday in our tiny school district in a lovely ceremony with all the pomp and circumstance of a much larger school. Congratulations to them and their families! In addition, our new library opens to the public Tuesday, and our summer friends are arriving—they of the full-time RV life—bringing their fresh faces and musical entertainment to our quiet town.

How are you? Is the season bringing you joy? What are you up to in your community and life? What changes does the summer season bring?

I opened the main page on my WordPress blog today and noticed I’d written 99 blogs so far. The number 99 is so close to 100 that I felt it best to get down to it and send out another. I don’t post regularly, so 100 posts isn’t really too impressive considering I started this blog in 2013. I spend much more time working on my manuscript and querying prospective agents than I spend blogging.

Still, it almost always feels good to write a blog post (once I’ve committed to sitting down and I’m at least a few paragraphs in-not so much at the beginning when I’m staring at the blank page, obviously) – it’s a way to reach out to family, and friends, old and new, and also is a sort of diary where I can record images and thoughts on times and places—and of course, there’s the curative element of a diary or journaling.

Recent and current books I’ve been reading: A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles; The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo; A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny; and Hang the Moon, Jeanette Walls. They are all wonderful!

A lovely book, and a fun journal I bought in January while traveling.

I was excited to learn that A Gentleman in Moscow has been adapted to the screen in a series (thank you, Denice from Washington who stopped into the library last week!), so I will watch that as soon as I finish the novel.

The Night Tiger is enthralling- we’re listening to it when we travel to the grocery store (112 miles away), and any other time we’re in the car for more than 10 minutes (which is anytime we leave town since we are so remote…). Here’s an example of the wonderful writing just from memory. Choo describes a doctor’s writing as “a conga line of ants.” Brilliant!

As for Louise Penny… she got me with the first Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery years ago, and I am never disappointed as the series progresses. Wonderful characters, heart, and settings.

Books! Wonderful books!

I am a big fan of Jeanette Walls and have read and reread The Glass Castle several times. Hang the Moon is another big thumbs up!

Meanwhile, the crickets are back. Just last week I was remarking that there weren’t any in our yard this year and maybe the gigantic hordes that usually march through town would miss us this year. Uh, no. I’m sure that no matter where you live you have some kind of unusual local wildlife… There are other parts of this state, for example, that experience large migrations of tarantulas, and I know the cicadas are a huge presence in other parts of the country. I’ve heard that Miller moths are everywhere in parts of Nebraska… It’s all a bit eek, but I always think of the line from one of the Jurassic Park films, “Life finds a way.”

I am one of trillions… I just want to travel south (I don’t know why!), but your house in the way! Please move your house!

This, too, shall pass!

Have a wonderful weekend and please do  check in and share what’s going on in your little corner of the world!

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July 29, 2023 · 5:53 pm

What I’m Reading: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Hello, Readers! I just finished The Midnight Library and wanted to linger over it a while longer. One way to preserve and examine a recent experience is to write about it. Another way would be to get together with my friends at the Austin Ladies Book Club, but it’s been a busy summer and we are on hiatus. Here then, is my short take on Matt Haig’s “whimsical” novel (as The Washington Post aptly calls it).

It’s an intriguing little book, chockful of tiny little chapters, each one the piece of a puzzle containing alternate lives for our damaged, yet clever and likable heroine, Nora Seed. It’s midnight, and as Nora’s consciousness flickers between life and death, a wise and kind librarian directs Nora to endless books of possibilities—the myriad different paths her choices may have led her, and may lead her still.

This is a puzzle many of us have played in our minds, and often, as in The Midnight Library, we move these pieces around in the wee hours of the night.

Imagine if I had…      What if I hadn’t…      If only I could go back and change…

Regrets.           Lost opportunities.                 

Shame.

Like Nora Seed, I’ve had plenty of these, and being the imperfect human I am, I continue to accrue new ones regularly. It can be a heavy load. The nights can be very dark.

Sometimes, a book can help. Some night soon when I drift off to sleep, perhaps I will find myself in a magic library like Nora’s. After all, I often have vivid dreams where things I experience in my waking hours revisit me in interesting and revealing ways (sometimes horrifying ways, too, but this isn’t that kind of book, thank goodness). So it could happen. Maybe tonight.

The Midnight Library is an obvious win-win for me, the lady lucky enough to run the local library and the lady who finds reading and writing endlessly captivating. It is wonderful for all the right reasons. Fun, and funny, too. Sweet, sad, insightful, and smart—it’s a little volume that may just lighten your heart.

If you read it, let me know what you think!

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