“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil,… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”
The women in my family always wrote. Journals, mostly. Many women fill their hope chests with clothing, linens, dishware. My mother filled hers with journals. They came in all sizes and types. Some were small enough that I could curl my palm around them. Others were large enough that they had to be held in… Continue reading The Women Always Wrote
“I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The Orchid Thief’
Reading is more dangerous than I thought. Not only is reading while walking cause for concern, but reading in bed may also be a problem. At least people who lived during the 1800’s thought it was. Like cigarettes are today, reading in bed was a fire hazard. People needed candlelight to see. If they drifted… Continue reading According to History, Reading in Bed Makes Me Evil
“I had traveled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The End of Night’
Losing the remnants of the past is one of the nightmares of historians. There are so many fragments that simply don’t survive the march of time, and as they disintegrate so too does our ability to understand the past. The modern era and its technologies raise new questions about how archivists, historians, and other interested… Continue reading How the Library of Congress is Trying to Archive Twitter
Sometimes I get a hankering to read old books. Luckily I’ve found a website that allows me to explore some of the rarest books in the world for free. The Rare Book Room is a website created by Octavo, a company that has digitized hundreds of rare books from the greatest libraries in the world. The… Continue reading Online Resource: Reading Free Rare Books
“Poison is a mainstay in mysteries and thrillers. Agatha Christie’s villains used it. Sherlock Holmes suspected it in several of his cases. And modern mysteries haven’t let poisons disappear. No, something about the subtlety of a deadly bane captures the human imagination. Is a servant trying to slip a nefarious concoction into the king’s wine? Is that… Continue reading So You Want to Murder Your Husband: Stories about Poison
As some of you may know, many folks in the book loving section of the internet participate in a semi-annual read-a-thon, known as Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-A-Thon. The read-a-thon happens in April and October and was first started in 2007. During the read-a-thon, participants attempt to spend 24 hours reading and discussing books. People also… Continue reading Happy 10th Anniversary to Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-A-Thon!
Writing is a type of freedom. It allows us to choose which portions of the world to highlight and which ones we want to discard. Telling stories also forces us to create boundaries. We can’t focus on everything, can’t follow the lives of every single character, can’t describe the layer of dirt on every doorstep. Instead… Continue reading What It Means to Tell a Story: On Susan Sontag and Writing
Kristen Twardowski 