by Renee Kimball “Giants are not as powerful as they seem and sometimes the shepherd has a sling in his pocket.” — Malcom Gladwell David...

by Renee Kimball Reading is like swimming.  Sometimes a novel is like a wading pool, low-level, light, humorous.  Then there are others...

Translated by Laura Vergnand –A Book Review by Renee Kimball What started as a post about the use of “bees” as literary metaphor became...

by Renee Kimball “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” ~...

by Renee Kimball Sometimes you stumble unawares into a book and then, in total surprise, you are rewarded.  That was my experience when I...

Whatever may be said about Through A Glass Darkly, it was and remains a hugely popular historical fiction novel.  I recently re-read...

“From the start . . . I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive.  It gets in your face.  Sometimes it shouts in...

By Renee Kimball Biblioholism *. . .book, of books; the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire, and consume books in excess. ...

The Nightingale—A Novel by Kristin Hannah is a weighty 564 pages.  The cover has shades of blue and grey with the embossed golden image...

by Renee Kimball It has been a year of extremes—Covid, freezing weather, and higher than average temperatures forecast for the summer...

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” Paracelsus, Swiss physician (1493 –1541)...

by Renee Kimball “Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of...

by Renee Kimball “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” ― Ray Bradbury “. . . And what, you ask, does writing teach...

by Renee Kimball Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, author Anne Fadiman explains the origin of the term, “common reader”—which...

by Renee Kimball “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~ Mary Oliver “Ten times a day something...

by Renee Kimball Meredith Maran decided to write a book about writing to show her “gratitude to writers everywhere.”  To do that,...

by Renee Kimball “The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling...

Memoir – noun:  a narrative composed from personal experience  – Merriam Webster Dictionary. Every memoir reminds us of the faraway and...

by Renee Kimball Neil Richard Gaiman will turn 60 this year. Gaiman’s stories and characters are now in our hearts and embedded in our...

by Renee Kimball 1986, Community College, Day One of Art Appreciation. Clumping to the podium on wooden clogs, dressed like Johnny Depp...