Chris Wolak

Recent Posts - page 2

• Library Stop: Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library, Old Lyme, CT

  By Chris Wolak on July 31, 2020 • ( 9 )

  

  Yesterday I picked up items on hold at the public library in Old Lyme, Connecticut. I’m happy to introduce you to the Old Lyme Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library. It was built in 1898 and has had some additions over the… Read More ›

• Response to “The Enchanted Bluff.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project

  By Chris Wolak on July 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  “The Enchanted Bluff” by Willa Cather was a delightful short story to read on a hot summer afternoon. That is, until the end when the narrator jumps twenty years into the future. This story is one of Cather’s earlier works,… Read More ›

• Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby

  By Chris Wolak on July 14, 2020 • ( 2 )

  

  This is a mystery/thriller in the noir tradition that takes you out of the city and into rural black America, specifically the southeast where blacks and whites might coexist, but slavery and the confederacy still linger.

• “The Enchanted Bluff” Willa Cather Short Story Project Reminder July 2020

  By Chris Wolak on July 8, 2020 • ( 1 )

  

  Our story for July is “The Enchanted Bluff.” We are making some serious progress on our quest to read all of Willa Cather’s short fiction. So far we’ve read seventeen stories in the four collections pictured above. Our next group… Read More ›

• Library Visit: Hagaman Memorial Library

  By Chris Wolak on June 30, 2020 • ( 4 )

  

  We’re back in Connecticut for this month’s library post, visiting The Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven, CT. As I wrote last month, one of the big impacts that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on my reading and working life… Read More ›

• Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

  By Chris Wolak on June 28, 2020 • ( 1 )

  

  Thanks to The Book of the Month Club, I just read my first Riley Sager novel and it was such a treat.* Home Before Dark is Sager’s forth novel. His prior novels are Final Girls, The Last Time I Lied,… Read More ›

• Response to “Before Breakfast.” The Willa Cather Short Story Project

  By Chris Wolak on June 24, 2020 • ( 7 )

  

  “Before Breakfast” by Willa Cather is the last story in the posthumously published collection, The Old Beauty and Others (1948). It’s a tight nugget of a story about a successful middle-aged businessman who escapes his work and family for a… Read More ›

• In Honor of Carlos Ruiz Zafón

  By Chris Wolak on June 21, 2020 • ( 12 )

  

  Carlos Ruiz Zafón passed away on Friday. Colon cancer. He was only 55. Ruiz Zafón is the author of one of my favorite novels, The Shadow of the Wind. It is a book I wish I could read again for… Read More ›

• June 2020 Reminder for The Willa Cather Short Story Project

  By Chris Wolak on June 10, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  Our story this month is “Before Breakfast,” the final of the three stories in The Old Beauty and Others (1948). “Before Breakfast” was the last story Cather finished. She wrote it in the summer of 1944 while staying on Mt. Desert… Read More ›

• The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

  By Chris Wolak on June 1, 2020 • ( 3 )

  

  I read The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett for the 23rd Classics Club Spin. Today, June 1st, is the date by which participants were to have finished their spin book. This book has been on my… Read More ›

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