Kara & Michael’s Blog

I’ve started a few english courses for the semester, and one of my darling professors started us off with a book that many critics feel has little or no real literary merit, but is just controversial. Or was, for its time in the 1920s, with depictions of what today would be termed any number of [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about kids lately. A friend and an acquaintance who’ve been married within the year and are the same age are pregnant. They news of both pregnancies came within a week of each other. I guess it spurs my thinking. Michael and I have been married a bit over a year, [...]

Every so often, I forget why I chose to become an English major. Don’t get me wrong, I read endlessly. But so often, I’m reading the same things because there is a comfort and familiarity there. Or I’m reading a cookbook or a magazine. There is enjoyment in all those reading activities, but little surpasses [...]

The first entry in a series.
Michael and I, at my request, watched The Ice Storm this weekend. I had seen one of the strangest scenes from the film before, but not the film in its entirety. I’m not going to talk much about the movie – I think it suffered from its “artistic sensibility.” [...]

Today, I checked out an e-book of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by the infamous Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens, as it were. It is difficult to express the pure delight I gain in reading this book. I’ve likely read it for classes two or three times, but it’s a book I come [...]

Anne Arundel County Public Libraries allow you to read e-books. So I grabbed a couple to read at work to combat my boredom, and one was a self-help book about ten mistakes couples make.
Before everyone starts freaking out about my marriage, everything is fine, I just figured a little reading never hurt anyone, minus [...]

According to a new AP-Ipsos poll, mentioned here, 27% of Americans report reading no books over the past year. Let me remind you that we have a basic literacy rate of 99%.
I had prepared some thoughts on this issue, but I think they can be adequately and succinctly summarized as follows:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! WHAT IS WRONG WITH [...]

One of my current activities, however misguided, is an effort to read all the books that I should have read long ago but never actually have. You know: In high school English, you get a list of a hundred books and are told to write reports about three of them, and so you trudge through [...]