Reading in the Garden

A Doggone Fun Book Dog On It by Spencer Quinn is a detective novel with a twist.  Chet and Bernie are partners in the Little Detective Agency.  Each has his strong points. Bernie is the thinker.  Chet is intimidating, if need be, and has a knack for smelling out criminals, literally.  Chet is a dog.  He’s also the narrator of the novel, which makes for a totally unique and fun read.  Chet’s wry commentary is hilarious, like when Bernie asks Chet if he needs to go out after being inside all day.  “Why would that be?” Chet thinks to himself.  “Just because my back teeth were floating?”  The Chet and Bernie mysteries are a series of books, Dog On It being the first volume.  In this particular assignment they’ve taken on, Bernie and Chet are hired to find a missing teenager. The duo work diligently together to solve the case. All the while, Chet’s perspective of the human and canine worlds kept me smiling throughout the book.  I...

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is about one day in the life of a woman getting ready for a party she is hosting—or so I thought. What I found out is that only two small instances in the book are devoted to Mrs. Dalloway’s party preparations.  Her venture to a shop in London to pick up flowers is how the book begins, and offers a most famous literary line. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”   The other party “fuss” is when Clarissa Dalloway sits down and calmly mends the green dress she is planning to wear to the evening event.  So, if we’re really not talking about the party, what’s happening the rest of the time, you ask? Well, the book follows the activities, thoughts and memories of people who in some way touch Clarissa’s life during the day.  We tiptoe into the minds and lives of various people such as a man she passes on a park bench who suffers from PSTD after the recent Great War. We ...

Kickin' It with the Classics If you’re just tuning in, you may not have noticed that every so often I toss in reviews of classic books.  My interest in classics dates back to ninth-grade English class with Mr. Haynes.  At the end of the school year Mr. Haynes gave us a reading list for summer break.  Most of the books on the list were classics. For some reason I kept the list and years later after high school, I looked at it and decided, what the heck, let’s give this thing a whirl.  Slowly I started reading the books and marking them off.  Each year I squeezed in a few classics between my other reading. Weird?  Maybe.  But I was curious, and it turns out they’re classics for a good reason.  So now, when some of those books are mentioned here or there, I now know what they’re talking about—without looking at Wikipedia.  As a bonus, it’s helped me in crossword puzzles too.  It’s true, some of the classics are a little more diffi...