Tag Archives: reading

Dispatches from the Writing Life #3: In Which There is Progress

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I finished revisions on chapter two. Finally, progress.

The challenge was to take two rough chapters and combine them into one. I find it difficult to jettison material (though I safely store it in a scrap file, just in case), whether it’s from primary or secondary sources, because it interested me enough to include it in the first draft.

But what interests me doesn’t always serve the story. The story I need to tell in this chapter is about Jane Grant’s first years of working at the New York Times. She was in her 20s and still harbored hopes of a singing career. Jane viewed the job at the Times as a means to an end, a way to support herself while she went out on auditions and took on performing gigs. Key to the chapter is how and why Jane became a journalist.

Now that I have that all set up, I’m getting ready to move on to the third chapter, which highlights another pivotal point in Jane’s life: working overseas for the YMCA during World War I. A lot of revisions will go into this, too, because I also spread these events over two draft chapters. Does the story require all of that material, all of those pages? That’s what I’m going to be working through. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of recent practice.

What I’m Reading

Many of the books on my library hold list come from reading Nancy Bekofske’s blog The Literate Quilter. She reviews a variety of fiction and nonfiction, even poetry. It’s a great way to keep up with forthcoming and recent publications.

I finished Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde and liked it well enough, especially the behind-the-scenes stories of how museums acquire collections. Lunde is also very good at delving into the characters of these museum men. But because of my own particular interests, I found myself more drawn to the women who, in this telling, existed on the periphery of these events.

I started Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. The first sentences of the prologue are stunning: “She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation….” There is Stein, fully alive, confident in her importance. Moreover, a casual look at the notes section of the book reveals an impressive amount of archival sources and ample citations for quotes and other information found in the text. Wade also discusses some of the process of her research in her acknowledgements. These are the kinds of things I regularly look at in nonfiction books.

I continue to read Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress. Consider these first sentences: “Her water broke. Mary, the family cook, helped her into bed. Besides Mary, Olive Rankin was alone on the ranch situated in Grant Creek Valley, some six thousand feet above Missoula, Montana.” And the beginning of the third paragraph: “Between contractions, Olive tried to focus on the wildflowers painting the mountainsides. White yarrow and purple lupine.” It’s all very evocative, but my first thought was, “How do we know?” The notes section doesn’t provide an answer. The information may have come from a previous biography of Rankin written by the late Norma Smith and published in 2002. Or Rinehart may have imagined the scene, leaning into creative nonfiction. I always prefer a sharp delineation between fact and imagination.

I’m still reading Vanity Fair. Still. But I’m closing in on the end.

What I’m Watching

The final episodes of Shetland and Bookish were both good, though I like the Shetland series more than Bookish. Maybe it’s because of a familiarity with the characters. But Bookish seemed a bit tentative about where it was going and what it wants to be. Still, I’m willing to watch the next season.

My ambivalence about Starfleet Academy continues. All Creatures Great and Small remains a good comfort watch, though I wish the female characters had better storylines.

New seasons of Grace (BritBox) and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) have moved into my rotation. I appreciate that Grace solves one crime per 90-minute episode. The Lincoln Lawyer is going to be a tense season, with Mickey Haller in jail awaiting his murder trial.

I also saw Agatha and the Truth of Murder (Prime), a re-imagining of what happened during Agatha Christie’s disappearance in the 1920s. I liked it.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I was asked by an academic press to review a book proposal, and I need to finish that before the end of February. This is not the kind of deadline that can be elastic. It’s not fair to keep a hopeful author waiting any longer than necessary.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate. May your favorite team win. And happy Olympics viewing, too.

Thanks for reading. Find out next week how chapter three is coming along.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #2: Revisionland

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I spent all week revising a chapter of Invisible Me, and I haven’t finished yet. Writing is always about revising, so I know how important this part is. And it’s only the first revision. There will likely be more.

This one is going particularly slow because I’m actually cutting and condensing material from two draft chapters to turn them into a single sparkling one. And I’m still thinking a lot about style, which is now something I look at very closely when I’m reading a work of nonfiction.

It took about the first half of the week to get a sense of where this new chapter needed to go and how to get it there. My goal is to have it finished at the end of this coming week.

After that, I know I will have a day or two of feeling optimistic that the rest of the chapter revisions will proceed more smoothly and quickly. Then, of course…. Sigh.

What I’m Reading

I’m almost finished with Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde. I started Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress. Rankin is one of my favorite women in American history, and I was happy to see this new biography.

I’m still reading Vanity Fair.

I forgot to mention that I read and loved Palaver, the new novel by Bryan Washington about a mother and her son.

In addition to books, which I prefer to read in the pages-between-two-covers form, I do read a variety of online things, including Pamela Toler’s History in the Margins for its explorations of those almost hidden corners. I especially liked her recent piece about the 20th-century artist Neysa McMein, who also happened to be a friend of Jane Grant.

Every morning, I read Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson’s daily explanation of current events.

What I’m Watching

I’m one episode in on Netflix’s Seven Dials, an Agatha Christie mystery. Good so far.

This week’s penultimate episode of Shetland ended with a couple of big yikes. I kind of saw one coming, but not the other. So it’s pins and needles until Thursday, when the finale airs.

I watched Eleanor the Great on Netflix. The performances were wonderful, especially June Squibb in the title role, but the plot resolution was too convenient.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I gave a zoom talk to the Baltimore Civil War Round Table about Dr. Mary Walker, the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor, about her medical work during the Civil War. My book, Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War, was published back in 2020, and it’s nice to know there is continuing interest in her story.

I met with my monthly women’s biography round table of the Biographers International Organization. I’ve been with this wonderful group for a few years, and every month we talk about our writing and give each other advice and encouragement. We all focus on “unknown” or “once known” women in history, so we all very much get each other.

Daily exercising has been limited to the portable elliptical machine because of the brutally cold weather. Wisconsin escaped the big snow that blanketed other parts of the country but got socked with below-zero temperatures that brought ever colder windchills. That’s finally started to ease up.

No sewing this week, though I continue to stare at the in-progress project that’s sitting on the machine, and I think about returning to it. I’m feeling some positive can-do vibes because of the return of Marie Hill, the best sewing instructor on YouTube. I found her channel, My Bucolic Life, a few years ago, and it encouraged me to get back into sewing. There are over 200 excellent tutorials on her channel.

The weekly bowling outing was fun, though I still struggle to break 100. So, no, I’m not a good bowler.

(Not me bowling. She may actually be a good bowler.)

Thanks for reading! Check back next week to find out what kind of progress I’ve made on the revisions. I know, I know, it’s very exciting.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #1

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Welcome to the first in a weekly (I hope) series that charts the progress of my current writing project, Invisible Me: Jane Grant and The New Yorker.

Since I have no deadline for finishing this book, the pace of progress is up to me. I’ve set goals throughout and meeting them has been greatly aided by three very supportive online writing communities. I envision this weekly series as adding another layer of accountability and cultivating another community (all of you).

I’ve been working on Invisible Me for a few years. Writing nonfiction history requires lots of time-consuming research and lots of writing, through multiple drafts. For this project, I’ve already made two major research trips, tracked down digitized online collections, and read dozens of published sources. Then I wrote an extremely bloated and somewhat blurry first draft.

After I finished, I wrote a book proposal so I could query literary agents for representation. The proposal, basically a sales pitch for the book, forced me to focus on the contours of the story, to make sure that Jane comes across as a multi-faceted person with plans and dreams, failures and successes, who has historical importance. During this past week, the last queries went out, and now I’m waiting to hear back from the agents. Or not. Many agents now don’t have the time to even send a rejection email, so if I don’t receive a response in a few weeks or a few months, it means they’ve passed. Or not. It’s fair game to nudge them once or twice before giving up.

While in agent-waiting mode, I’ll read through those first draft chapters to assess the scope of writing work ahead, to start a second, bloat-free draft. I may set an initial goal of completing one chapter per month.

Writing occupies part, but certainly not all, of my day. It’s the work part of my day. Luckily, since I’ve retired from academia, I set my own hours. I also read a lot and watch shows on various streaming services.

What I’m Reading

I recently finished a couple of nonfiction books about spies: The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young and Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor by Christine Kuehn. Both are good, and Kuehn’s book especially packs a lot of yikes moments.

In two blissful sittings I read Maddie Ballard’s compact memoir, Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary. I recently returned to sewing after a thirty-some year hiatus, and I loved how Ballard wrote about garment construction and identity and relationships. It’s beautiful.

And now I’m a few chapters into Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde, not at all the usual kind of book I pick up. But I’m a big fan of museums, and he presents an interesting story.

On the fiction front, I recently read Ann Cleeve’s The Killing Stone, a new Jimmy Perez story. I’m a big fan of Shetland (see below) and was happy that Cleeve brought back one of my favorite detectives, even if he’s not on Shetland anymore. I absolutely loved Sacrament, Susan Straight’s marvelous novel about nurses at a California hospital during Covid. And I continue reading (or sometimes plodding through) Vanity Fair, the 19th century classic by William Makepeace Thackeray. I’m sticking with it for an online book discussion next month. In previous years, this group has read Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, so there’s a definite vibe to these selections.

What I’m Watching

BritBox recently debuted Season 10 of Shetland, and I’m eagerly keeping up with all the episodes. Perez has moved on, but his replacement, Ruth Calder, has great chemistry with Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. I’m already looking forward to Season 11.

On PBS, there’s a new season of All Creatures Great and Small and a new mystery series called Bookish. And Paramount+ launched Starfleet Academy, the latest addition to the Star Trek universe, and it’s okay so far.

I keep meaning to watch the final episode of Stranger Things on Netflix but haven’t been in the right mood yet. I find Young Sheldon and Mom (neither of which I watched on network t.v.) reliably good, and I revisit The West Wing and The Closer from time to time.

What Else I’m Doing

Daily exercising (a portable elliptical machine is essential during winter), sewing (very sporadically lately), thrifting (one of my favorite pastimes that sometimes is related to what I’m sewing), bowling (once a week as extra exercise that’s also a fun outing).

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. Hope you check back next week to see what kind of progress I’ve made.

My 2025 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction

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This may be a first for my annual list of nonfiction favorites, but it’s certainly not surprising. All fifteen of the books listed below, plus a bonus title, were written by women. And all fifteen are about women. Unusual and a bit surprising: I read several memoirs.

In my last post I mentioned that I sometimes forget to log my books on Goodreads, which makes tallying up a year’s worth of reading inexact. I’m leading the 2025 list with my most embarrassing omission from last year because I can’t bear for everyone not to know that it’s one of my favorite works of nonfiction. The rest are listed roughly in the order in which I read them.

1. The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany by Pamela D. Toler. This is an excellent and much needed biography of Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief and foreign correspondent in Central Europe who warned about the dangers of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. The book received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’s 2024 Book Prize in Biography.

2. The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton. A first-rate dual biography of two of the most important birth control activists in United States history. Sanger’s name is the more familiar of the two, but Gorton convincingly demonstrates that Dennett deserves just as much attention. I’ve long been a huge fan of Dennett so was particularly pleased to see her in the limelight. And she’s the subject of an Ogden Nash poem, probably the only verse I know by heart.

I for one
Think the country would be better run,
If Mary Ware Dennett
Explained things to the Senate.

3. The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin. I first read The Diary of a Young Girl in a grade school English class. Over the years, I’ve read the expanded versions as well as books about Frank, her family, and the people who made the Secret Annex possible. Franklin combines a well-written biography of Anne Frank with investigations into the various forms of the diary, the ways in which it has been dramatized for stage and screen, and how Frank has become a fictional character in the works of other authors. Fascinating all the way through.

4. Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund by Caitlin McGurk. This biography wins Best Title of the Year, at least as far as me and my list are concerned. Who wouldn’t want to hear that story? And McGurk has done a marvelous job of situating artist Shermund in her proper place in the history of American illustrators and cartoonists. I was especially intrigued with Shermund’s work for The New Yorker during its early years, when Jane Grant was still around. The two women probably had a lot in common.

5. After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall. These essays, by a genius biographer, blend memoir with craft advice. It’s all beautifully written and inspiring.

6. Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder. Wow, wow, wow. An insightful, incisive biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who married George Orwell. Funder shows exactly what O’Shaughnessy contributed to the artistic success of Orwell and explores how and why she was pretty much written out of the biographies of the author. The book has made a huge impact on how I view Jane Grant.

7. Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction by Andrea Barrett. I adore Barrett’s fiction, and I loved her take on novelists’ use of history in their (and her own) work. Beautiful.

8. The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir by Martha S. Jones. Jones is a brilliant historian, and she has deployed her formidable skills to answer a personal question for herself: “Who do you think you are?” Her search takes her through her family’s history, which included enslavement, as she grapples with the meaning of color in the lives of her ancestors—and herself.  

9. The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir by Sarah Kendzior. A family memoir of a different kind, Kendzior looks at politics and society in America, past and present, through road trips she takes with her family during the pandemic years. I admired the gorgeous writing, the strong sense of place, and the whiffs of nostalgia infused with a bit of hopefulness.

10. Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography by Joanne B. Mulcahy. This biography focuses on all the things I’m drawn to in this genre: a once well-known woman, incredibly smart and talented, whose political beliefs led her to live an unconventional life, who somehow disappears from history. Greenwood, a devotee of social realism, painted some of the most stunning murals and portraits in the first half of the twentieth century. Mulcahy, with her usual elegant prose, reminds us why it’s still important to know about her.

11. Birding to Change the World: A Memoir by Trish O’Kane. Originally an investigative journalist, O’Kane switched careers after Hurricane Katrina upended her life. She developed an interest in birds, enrolled in an environmental studies Ph.D. program, and embarked on a social justice campaign to save a local park from over-development. O’Kane’s passion and dedication shine through—for her academic work and love of learning, her community and its people, and the many species of birds she encounters.

12. Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh. Goh traces the history of the orange as she untangles the strands of her multi-cultural heritage. She travels from Ireland to China and Malaysia to connect with far flung family members, seeking answers about her identity. The orange, with its own complicated history, gives her grounding and perspective. I liked this unique approach to memoir.

13. The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss. The presence of a Native American girl, Sophie Mousseau, in an 1868 photograph taken at Fort Laramie is Sandweiss’s jumping off point for this meticulous work of history about post-Civil War America and westward expansion. It’s a densely packed story, and Sandweiss’s other real-life characters, including photographer Alexander Gardner and Union general William S. Harney, occupy much of the narrative. But Mousseau is a constant, almost haunting presence, at the heart of the story.

14. Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay by Andrea Friederici Ross. During the Victorian era, known for its constraints on women’s behavior, these three sisters pushed at the boundaries of those expectations to make names for themselves in music, writing, and domestic reform. It’s an absorbing family biography, and Ross calmly and ably juggles all the different personalities.

15. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean. I’m a fan of Orlean but not a super fan. I haven’t read everything she’s written but I liked The Library Book and many of her articles. Reading this memoir provides the sense of exhilaration portrayed on the book’s cover. I was fascinated by how Orlean carved out a career as a writer and enjoyed the snippets of her personal life that she included.

Bonus book:

How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences by Tilar J. Mazzeo. A former academic who has written bestsellers, and Mazzeo provides practical advice to narrative nonfiction writers, especially those who want to move away from scholarly writing. It’s one of the most helpful how-to writing books I’ve read in a long time.

And one final kind of quirky thing about my 2025 reading. In a previous post I wrote about how much I liked Debby Applegate’s Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, but had to stop reading it because it invaded too much of my head space while I was drafting my book about Jane Grant. Well, that happened again. This time I set aside The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s latest book. It’s terrific, but Shapiro’s voice is so strong that the book is now sitting on the shelf next to Madam, where they will stay until I’m much further along with Jane. (At least I didn’t put them in the freezer, which was Joey Tribianni’s solution to troublesome books.)

To all of you who made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you encounter loads of good books in 2026 that take you on your own joyride.

My 2025 Reading, Part One: Fiction

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Welcome to my annual reading round-up, in which I share the books I enjoyed, both fiction (in this post) and nonfiction (in the next post). I read these books in 2025, though they were not necessarily published in that year. Sometimes I don’t get around quickly to ones that I want to read because of lengthy hold lists at the public library. Sometimes I’m interested in a book and know that I’m not in the right mood to read it. So, reasons.

(Woman Reading on a Settee by William Worcester Churchill)

According to Goodreads, where I keep track of such things, I read five more books in 2025 than I did in 2024—up to 56 from 51. I was surprised by the increase because it felt like such a sluggish reading year. And 56 is a likely number. Sometimes I forget to log in what I’ve read. (I already had to edit this number because as I was typing, I remembered another book. And in my next post, the one about nonfiction, I have to admit to a horribly embarrassing omission.) This total also doesn’t account for the books I started and (unfortunately) did not finish. I have no trouble putting a book down. Life is too short to keep reading books that don’t interest me, and I have zero desire to post negative reviews.

So here is my 2025 list, roughly in the order in which I read them.

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Definitely not published in 2025! This classic really surprised me: that I finished it and that I enjoyed it so much. I first tried reading Middlemarch back in graduate school when I was looking for something that would transport me from my work. Dorothea Brooke intrigued and irritated me, but Casaubon stopped me cold. Many years later I tried again, with the same result. This time I pushed through, encouraged by an online group read, got interested in all (so, so many) sub-plots, and made it to the end.

2. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

This Dutch novel, set in 1961, is a haunting story of the long reach of World War II’s devastation. Delicate and atmospheric, I was riveted by every page. Isabel is a prickly character, but I had to know what happened to her.

3. The Antidote by Karen Russell

I read a lot of historical fiction, but usually not stories that are infused with magic. Russell sets her novel in Nebraska, which is suffering from dust storms and the Great Depression, and adds to the mix a “Prairie Witch” who stores peoples’ secrets. It all somehow works perfectly.

4. The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer

A dual-timeline story that explores the collecting, hoarding, and thieving of rare colored birds’ eggs from Yorkshire. Celie Sheppard is such an unforgettable hero that I found myself quickly invested in the multi-layered consequences of this arcane hobby.

5. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

I was immediately drawn into the life of Dave Win, who as a boy in the 1960s, gets a scholarship to a boarding school, where he starts to learn to navigate the class, race, and sexuality boundaries of British society.

6. Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I didn’t know anything about Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland mysteries until I watched the dramatized versions on PBS. I was so happy when I found out Horowitz published another one in 2025 that I made sure to get hold of a copy as soon as possible. The very meta nature of the story, a mystery within a mystery, was delightful start to finish.

7. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

One of my guilty literary admissions is that I’m not a fan of Shakespeare’s work. However, I am intrigued by the man and his times. O’Farrell delivers a piercing imagining of the life of Agnes, the unconventional woman who marries William, a young tutor whose desire to write takes him away from his family for months at a time. It falls to Agnes to mind the household and keep the children safe as the plague moves through the community.

8. James by Percival Everett

I have vague memories of trying to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was young, but I could not muster much interest in the antics of either of the boys. But James had me from the first paragraphs. Everett’s character is flat out fabulous.

9. Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin

Next to Middlemarch, this was the most surprising read of the year for me. I picked it up on a whim from the New Books shelf at the library and was immediately captivated by the little girl who figures out how to get along in a world that doesn’t understand her neurodivergence.

10. A Slowly Dying Cause by Elizabeth George

I was startled to realize that this is Inspector Lynley’s 22nd outing. I haven’t been with George’s long running series since the beginning. I came into it at number 7, Playing for the Ashes, and went back and read them in order until I got caught up again. I continue to find Lynley and Havers fascinating characters, but the ending of this procedural was very unusual.

11. All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

In New York City, after a climate disaster has brought about ruinous floods, young Nonie and her family take refuge in the American Museum of Natural History. When another storm threatens their safety, they decide to move on to find a better place—and maybe hope for the future. I don’t usually read dystopian novels, but I’m glad I took a chance on this one.

12. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen

I admired how Jen mashed up memoir and fiction to delve into her mother’s life, first in China, then as an immigrant to the U.S. Agnes (as she’s known in her new country) is constantly challenged by her strong-willed daughter Jen, and the two spend decades trying to figure each other out.

Hope you read a lot of good fiction in 2025, too. Have you read any of the ones on my list?

Next up: my nonfiction list.

Happy New Year!