After a week (at least) of gray skies and temps in the 40s, the sunny weekend was the motivation I needed to plant my Seed Library seeds! I’m using the tabletop greenhouse I got for my birthday, but you can find seed trays and accessories at most garden and hardware stores. The Seed Library has lots of vegetable, herb and […]
It’s National Library Week, and what better way to feel the library love than by joining an international celebration of reading? The Big Library Read is the world’s largest digital book club, with over 20,000 libraries participating, including Algonquin Area Public Library District. Taking part is easy. Between April 4 -18, use the Libby digital library app to download the […]
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. […]
The excitement is real for genealogy fans. On April 1st, the 1950 Census was released by the National Archives. The 1950 census is available to browse at the National Archives website: https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950 This census is not yet fully indexed, but there is a search engine for the AI (machine) index- it’s kind of like OCR for handwriting, so you can […]
Who says you can’t run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes—it would be too awkward—and you can’t say no—it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy. […]
