There was a time when I wrote everything by hand. As a university student in the early 1970s, while most of my peers were cranking out essays on manual or electric typewriters, every paper that I submitted was handwritten. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to type. My mother had insisted that typing was a skill that every girl should have, so I had taken typing classes in high school. I just preferred to write by hand. My early freelance articles were handwritten, but I typed a final copy for submission because that was required by most publications. Then came computers and the ease of word processing. I made the transition to writing on a keyboard and never looked back.
There are, however, some areas where I have intentionally hung onto vestiges of the past.
In a world where it seems that we’re constantly glued to screens, I still prefer a physical, paper calendar that gives me a visual overview of upcoming appointments and events. One hangs on our kitchen wall and I carry a smaller version in my purse.
I also use a simple paper planner where I write my daily to-do list. Putting pen to paper and actually writing down my intentions and placing them where I will see them multiple times throughout the day keeps me focused on accomplishing them and there’s something deeply satisfying about crossing off each item as it’s completed. Unlike digital alerts that disappear once they’re completed, a handwritten paper planner also provides a record of tasks completed and gives me a greater sense of accomplishment. Ultimately though, the best calendar or planner is the one that a person will use consistently and for me, that’s paper.
Then there’s books. When we travel, I absolutely love the convenience of the e-reader that my daughter gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, but at home I still prefer to immerse myself in the pages of an actual, physical book.
What about you? Have you completely joined the digital world or are you like me, still a little bit old-school?
Buying a Piece of Paris is a charming memoir about the Australian author’s humorous and challenging quest to find and purchase an apartment in Paris. With only two weeks to locate and secure the apartment of her dreams, something exuding character and Parisian chic, Ellie embarks on what seems an almost impossible pursuit. Armed with only a cursory grasp of the language, she finds herself trying to navigate the bewildering French real estate market with its unique customs, quirky agents, and unexpected cultural hurdles. All in all, a very entertaining read and especially so since, although I’ve only spent five days in Paris, I could visualize many of the places that she mentioned and the kind of buildings she visited in her frantic and sometimes hilarious search for the perfect place to call home.
After moving with her husband to the tiny, bustling city of Macau, across the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong, Grace Miller finds herself a stranger in a very foreign land. Facing the devastating news of her infertility and a marriage in crisis, Grace resolves to do something bold, something that her impetuous mother might have done. Turning to her love of baking, she opens Lillian’s, a café specializing in coffee, tea, and delicate French macarons. In this story of love, friendship, and renewal, Lillian’s quickly becomes a sanctuary where women from different cultural backgrounds come together to support one another.
When Jennifer Connolly of 
If I didn’t know that this novel was was a well-researched, but fictionalized retelling of a true story I would have thought it a bit far-fetched. A father giving his 16-year-old daughter control of three family plantations in South Carolina while he leaves the country to secure his political position on the Caribbean island of Antigua would be remarkable at any time, but this was 1738! At a time when the role of women was purely domestic, intelligent and headstrong Eliza Lucas was determined to find a cash crop to pull the plantations out of debt, pay for their upkeep, and support her family.
This book is really three stories in one, each distinct, but all connected. Deborah Birch is a seasoned hospice nurse assigned to care for an embittered and lonely history professor whose career ended in academic scandal. As his life slowly ebbs away, the professor, an expert in the Pacific Theater of World War II, begrudgingly puts his trust in Deborah and begins to share with her an unpublished book that he wrote. As she reads to him from his story about a Japanese fighter pilot who dropped bombs on the coastline of Oregon, he challenges her to decide if it is true or not.
I’ve been avoiding books set during World War II lately. Over the past year or so I’d read so many of that popular genre that I was growing weary of them, but The Book Thief was different from most.
Until the end, when the two finally come together, this is really two completely different storylines connected only by a specific location.
Geertruida (Truus) Wijsmuller, a childless member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after Hitler’s annexation of Austria when, across Europe, countries begin to close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape. After Britain passes a measure to take in at-risk child refugees from the German Reich, Tante Truus, as she is known by the children, dares to approach Adolf Eichmann, the man who would later help devise the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and is granted permission to escort a trainload of 600 children (not 599 or 601, but exactly 600) out of the country. In a race against time, 600 children between the ages of 4 and 17 are registered, photographed, checked by medical doctors and put on board the train to begin a perilous journey to an uncertain future abroad. Thus begins the famous Kindertransport system that went on to transport thousands of children out of various parts of Europe during the Nazi occupation of the region in the late 1930s, immediately prior to the official start of World War II.
After reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a 713 page novel about life in India in the 1970s and 80s, and then Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, I was looking for something light to read! Something frivolous and entertaining.
Following Augustine 