If you’ve been anywhere near a theater or television in the past month, you know that the film adaptation of Les Miserables opened on Christmas day. Yesterday, I survived the three-hour viewing (2 hours, 37 minutes of the...
Maybe you’ve seen mention of Chris Ware’s Building Stories on some of the Best of 2012 lists circulating. I bought the book as a pre-Christmas treat for myself and just finished reading it the other day. My experience with...
I should qualify this “Best of 2012” list by saying that I’ve read only a few of the books that are circulating on most of the end of year lists. Like most average readers, my reading throughout the year includes old and...
Faithful blog readers will recall that last year at this time, I could only talk about one movie, The Tree of Life. (Revisit my raving here.) I chose it for my favorite movie in 2011 and didn't do a list at all because...
This is my 100th post on the Shimmers in the Darkness blog, which I began in October of 2010. Months ago, I had an idea for the post. I had been looking at the stats and noticed that the most-viewed...
One of my favorite books is Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. Sometimes, in conversations when I mention this, I find myself stumbling over my description of the book. “It’s about two elderly ranchers,” I’ll say, “and the small Colorado...
I’m currently editing my latest novel, which partly takes place in an office building in downtown Chicago. It’s drawn loosely from my work experience from 1995-2000, when I was the receptionist for a Chicago philanthropist...
This week, a third book was published under HarperCollins' new Authonomy imprint. I am rarely tempted by the fantasy genre, but this one looks fantastic. It’s called Brotherhood of Shades and the author, Dawn Finch, has...
As he did each morning at five o’clock, Richard flung an arm over the damp pillow and pressed the button on his alarm clock. The piercing staccato stopped....
"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka
