Writing Book Reviews

It’s been said that an intellectual is someone who reads with a pencil in hand. These days I’d update that to say they highlight and make notes in their digital library. I didn’t jump on the digital books bandwagon until about seven years ago, but I am a full-fledged adherent now. About 90% of the

The Making of Biblical Womanhood review

My faith tradition doesn’t have the same concepts of “Biblical Womanhood” as many I have read about before, as well as discussed in this book. I hadn’t heard of a “Proverbs 31 woman” until recently – a woman modeled after the scripture verses in that chapter – which can be viewed as both a sweet

Laziness Does Not Exist review

I picked up this book based on the description. I recently read Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and these two books touched on very similar themes that counter a popular narrative that “kids today” don’t know what hard work is. And it’s not even just Millennials who deal with this (though I

Favorite Books of 2020

Well… this certainly was a year, wasn’t it? I remarked on social media recently the dark humor that is watching planner community videos from the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 as they set up their new productivity systems. I know I had a nice little planner for my writing life that basically

You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe

Alexis Coe begins her biography of George Washington by stating that she had looked over her shelf of previously published biographies of Washington and noted they were all written by men. And as soon as she pointed that out I was even more determined to read what she had to say because gaining a woman’s

Favorite Books of 2019

Being a librarian and former bookseller, I’m a voracious reader who tries to read widely to try out different genres and styles of reading. Here are a few of the standouts from my 2019 reading list. This was a book that seemed tailor-made for me. As a one-time huge fan of VH1’s Behind the Music,

Good and Mad

A 2017 Pew survey found that nearly six in ten women said they were paying increased attention to politics since the 2016 election, a greater share than men. I’m for sure one of those six. I never considered myself a political person until the 2016 election. I barely paid attention to government matters most of

To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved

I got another review up at the Association for Mormon Letters website. Please give it a gander, and check out the book!

PhD Student Meets Hitler

I’ve been reading Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, which compiles the journals and letters and other observations of people who visited Germany starting in the 1920s and the Weimar Republic and into the Hitler regime. I find this a totally fascinating topic because so many people vacationed or conducted business in Germany

Vampires in the Temple

My review of Mette Harrison’s Vampires in the Temple was posted on the Association for Mormon Letters site! Go give them some traffic.