There are no moral lectures in 'Lookaway, Lookaway;' there aren't even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance.

Cathleen Schine

a letter ... changes utterly the moment it slips inside an envelope. It stops being mine. It becomes yours. What I mean is gone. What you understand is all that remains.

Cathleen Schine

gone letters mean

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

Cathleen Schine

life-is-full-of-surprises surprise life-is

The honeysuckle was everywhere the day the letter arrived, like heat. Wild roses bloomed in hedges of tendrils and perfume. There were fat bees, dirigible bees, plump and miniature. It was a sweet, tangled morning, and the sun rose, leisurely, in a spectacular blush.

Cathleen Schine

wild-roses morning sweet

Elinor Lipman tweets like a nightingale with an eagle eye.

Cathleen Schine

tweet eagles eye

I love my bed. It is larger than a desk and better designed to hold books and papers. It is softer than a desk and better designed for naps. It is the center of all good things. And day or night, everyone knows where to find me.

Cathleen Schine

naps night book

Love letters lack taste. No restraint: falling off cliffs, going up in flames.

Cathleen Schine

flames letters fall

Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons.

Cathleen Schine

smart mother sex

One really understands testicles after reading 'The Family Jewels,' and one is gratified.

Cathleen Schine

testicles reading jewels

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

Cathleen Schine

pie writing book

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

Cathleen Schine

wall mind years

... there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.

Cathleen Schine

mother-and-son mother-son men

Use Me is a wonderfully satisfying book.

Cathleen Schine

using-me use book

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

Cathleen Schine

new never myself thirty

Good TV is not just TV about good behavior.

Cathleen Schine

about just good behavior

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though?

Cathleen Schine

online shopping research blessing

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

Cathleen Schine

wrong about intelligence complicated

I was one of those children they used to call 'readers.'

Cathleen Schine

those call used children

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

Cathleen Schine

understand you reading time

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.

Cathleen Schine

after career scholar notes

A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think.

Cathleen Schine

tenth i-think think plenty