a recent read: a dog's life.

If you like reading, British-infused wit, and dogs, then you should probably read this book. A Dog's Life is a "canine memoir", a tale of life in Provence told from the perspective of Boy, author Peter Mayle's dog. Boy shares his insightful views on many topics including hygiene, cocktail parties, wine tastings, love, tennis ball educate, the nuisance known as cats, and the "seven gestures of appeasement", or his repertoire of nonverbal communication guaranteed to get any dog out of trouble. If you love or have ever loved a doggie, I think you'd like reading this too.

Peter Mayle is one of my favorite authors. His books are excellent vacation companions - short chapters, dry humor, and full of wry observations that make his books all very fun to read but easy to put down when it's time for dinner or a swim in the ocean. I also love A Year in Provence and Acquired Tastes. Check them out if you need something low key to read.

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a recent read: divining women.

My view, reading on the fire escape outside our bedroom window on a nice day.

This week I started and finished Divining Women, written by Kaye Gibbons. It's essentially this incredibly crafted story of the female experience in 1918 America and, as one critic with words better than mine put it, "a harrowing and explicit declaration of the power of a woman wronged". I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and finished much quicker than I anticipated, chiefly due to Gibbons' brilliant writing that swept me up. I hope to check out more of her books from the library this weekend. I love what she writes about below: 

"She believed that a woman had to be bright enough to choose correctly and distinguish between abiding trust and transient infatuation. She believed...that a woman's intelligence, which she called "the ability and desire to spend as much time in the world of serious ideas as in the shoe shop," should be swirled in with her other attributes. She spoke of intelligence as heightening the impact a woman could make, the way a cook might scare vanilla batter with just enough nutmeg to make the cake memorable".

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