blakspring

Yes, it’s true. Today I met the queen of bloggers herself Heather Armstrong, a.k.a. Dooce. (Heather, if you actually read this, I hope you appreciate all the exclamation points in the title. I know how much you loooooooooooove extreme punctuation.) She and her husband Jon were in NYC because Heather was on […]

D and I went to the movies last night to see Persepolis. It is an animated film based on (or rather taken directly from the pages of) the graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. The books are fantastic depicting the life of a young girl during the Iranian revolution, her […]

After Wednesday’s ice skating, I was hoping that the energy level would continue for the rest of this week. Alas it was not to be, mainly because I’m a sissy and there was no way I was going to step outside in yesterday’s frigid weather. (Well, maybe if there was a big pile […]

This weekend my friend Emer Martin and her family arrived in NYC for a visit. Emer and I go back to our undergrad days, where we met in a fiction writing class. She already had one book published, Breakfast In Babylon, and she was working on her second novel, More Bread or I’ll […]

One of my all-time favorite books is The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. In fact, I love the whole His Dark Materials trilogy, but TGC is special because it sets the stage for the amazing story and introduces the reader to Lyra, Iorek, and other wonderful and complex characters. I’ve read this book […]

I am reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and loving it immensly.  I don’t want to put it down and I don’t want it to end.  I’ve read other books by Stephenson and this is definitely my favorite so far.  The book is full of cyberpunk imagery so I have to imagine skull guns, […]

I just finished reading a book called The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn. It was a very interesting inside look at the NYPD Cold Case Squad which solves crimes that have been forgotten, some even dating back to the fifties. I had never heard of the […]

How is it possible that I have not only never read, but also never heard of, John Fante until recently? Luckily for me, a friend turned me on to Fante during a very long and involved conversation about literature. He said that if I like Henry Miller and Bukowski, I would probably like […]