Mimi–who has a fabulous blog about cooking and eating in Israel–wrote a particularly good response to my post about women and “big idea” books:
The first name that springs to mind is that of Freya Stark, a British explorer who traveled extensively in the Middle East during the late 1920s and 30s. She wrote over 24 [...]

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In addition to the oddity of calling foreign countries names that have nothing to do with their actual name, Literary Saloon points out another annoying problem with foreign words, specifically, the need to adopt uniform rules of transliterating names and other words that are becoming part of the American lexicon:
As great a tool as Google is, [...]

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Why are all the “big idea” books written by men? And for that matter, why isn’t any of the “serious” travel literature written by women? Book reviewer Geraldine Greer has an opinion on the first question. When talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Greer commented:
“His maleness resounds from every [...]

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Park Howell posted a list of 40 ways to improve your life that has been floating around the internet. He challenged readers to add to the list. While I only have 27 years of experience at living, I do have plenty of opinions on how to do it better. Here’s my two cents:

Life is too [...]

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A curious person who is interested in the great wide world out there but who is not ridiculously wealthy is, by necessity, a voracious reader. At least, that’s how I explain my Amazon Prime account.
I don’t read very much fiction, mostly because it is too much work to gain a comparatively tiny nugget of truth. [...]

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