Sometimes, I need to let a book marinate before passing judgment on it. A clever twisty thriller might, after a few days' consideration, sprout countless plotholes. Far more rare -- and more enjoyable -- are the times that a "it was pretty good, I guess," book transforms into “I can't stop thinking about this story!" Happily,…
September brought another fine gathering of our Genealogy Networking Group. We started out by sharing brick walls and breakthroughs. One of the biggest brick walls we all face is "jumping the pond" and researching our immigrant ancestors in their home country. The tried but true rule is, in almost every case, you need to know…
“The truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.” Kate Morton, “The Clockmakers Daughter” Reading Kate Morton’s intricately plotted new novel The Clockmakers Daughter, is like pulling apart a Russian nesting doll until the last tiny doll is found in the center. At the center of this book is Birchwood Manor and…
Welcome back to my series of posts on local history! While looking for a topic for this post, I realized that we have somehow neglected to write about the history of a Libertyville institution: Lambs Farm! Since its inception as a small pet store in the fall of 1961, Lambs Farm has made it its…
I first encountered author Naomi Novik’s work with her delightful Temeraire series that featured talking dragons during the Napoleonic Wars. When the series ended, I read her standalone, Uprooted, an imaginative Grimm-like fairytale for adults that won the prestigious Nebula Award. Her newest book, Spinning Silver, continues along those lines and takes inspiration from the…
I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I am not an avid fly fisherman nor do I spend my spare time tying salmon flies for fun. However, if you were to take a peek at my browser history, you might suspect otherwise. Some of my recent Internet searches have included “Greater Bird of…
In part 1 of this series on the 1889 Union Church signature quilt, we learned about signature quilts in general, explored some of the unique characteristics of this specific quilt, and revealed the history of the Union Church. Part 2 looked at some of the Libertyville people and businesses represented by the signatures. In Part 3, we'll…
I picked up Libby Page’s The Lido expecting a fast, cheerful read. The breezily illustrated cover suggested that I’d probably like it just fine, but forget about it after a few days. Delightfully, I was wrong. Yes, it’s a fast read. Yes, it’s cheerful (mostly). Yes, I had to look up how to pronounce lido.…
As a Nigerian-American girl and voracious reader growing up in Homewood Flossmoor and Hinsdale, Illinois, Tomi Adeyemi rarely encountered powerful characters who looked like her. Nevertheless, this 24 year-old recent Harvard graduate has burst onto the scene this year with a NY Times best-selling book set in the mythical West African kingdom of Orisha which…
At our last Genealogy Networking Group meeting, we did a lot of sharing. Never Too Late. We always share brick walls or breakthroughs. One of our members found information in a book printed in 1929 that completely changed the research that she's been doing since 1984. Remember you can look for books at Internet Archive,…
