When I was a kid, there was a boy I knew in the class two grades above me (he was two years older). I knew him because we were both faculty kids: his dad was the music teacher, and my mom taught fifth grade, as well as some music and theater. Actually, she had been...
I just spent an hour as a guest on a conference call for Spencer Reynolds’s wonderful reading group, Book Readers Club. Spencer has been leading this group, dubbed “Where Dedicated Learners Come Together Every Week,” for some five years now. Participants hail from all...
Some of you will remember a post I wrote last summer, when Ana was traveling the globe and I sat at home on our deck in central Massachusetts, eating good meals and watching the garden with Ana’s mom, Sylvia. The post was about a story Sylvia told me one evening,...
What a feeling: elation, exuberance, exhilaration! For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a chapter. One chapter. I mean, one chapter, for weeks — that’s plural, more than one, weeks! Here’s what happened. I’m working on a book on leadership, working with a...
I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new collection, What the Dog Saw, and just had to stop to comment. It’s no wonder this guy’s books seem to defy the laws of gravity, hovering at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller lists for dozens of months on...
I’ve thought about doing this for years, but never got around to it before: noting down which books I’ve read recently. I think I “never got around to it” because it always seemed a bit self-indulgent, like declaiming to the world what I ate for breakfast: who cares?...
