Bibliophile
Red Door Reviews
In 2012, I launched a Twitter Book Review feed called Red Door Reviews.
Tweet-sized offerings on book content and quality. Title, review, link, star rating. A rapier wit as space and context allow.
For a full list of my past reviews, please visit my website.
You can receive my book review tweets by following me @RedDoorReviews.
Chronicle of an Avid Reader
A mouse changed my life.
Of course, he was no ordinary mouse. Stuart Little wore clothes, spoke, had human parents. One night in 1989, I flopped face down on my bed with his story. We stayed up all night together, a mouse wearing a cravat and a five-year-old girl wearing a pink polyester nightgown, hiding from cats, drinking sarsaparillas. When the dawn came, I was different. In one night I'd lived a whole life, had experienced heartbreak and triumph. Even as I pressed the covers closed again, the adventure stayed with me. I knew I'd read the book again, but I also knew I had to read others. Lots of them.
Thanks in no small part to characters like Nancy Drew and Henry Reed, as well as authors like Avi and Judy Blume, I spent my entire childhood with a book in my hand. Books then proceeded to follow me through high school, college, into my marriage, my career, and now graduate school.
The pleasure of a good book is the way its flint connects with my steel. There is no protagonist in the world of literature who exists or prospers without firing something in the heart of the reader. I am as integral to every story I read as any of the characters, any element of plot, any moral, any setting, any conflict. Reading is the most active way I know to seek out relationships and knowledge. It is useful, and it inspires me every day.
If you stop by for a visit, please take a moment to recommend your favorite book to me. I keep a list of recommendations and would be grateful to receive more!
Books I Have Loved
Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank
All Over But the Shoutin' - Rick Bragg
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Manhood for Amateurs - Michael Chabon
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
An American Childhood - Annie Dillard
The Writing Life - Annie Dillard
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Home Ground - Lynn Freed
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - Alexandra Fuller
Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
The Little Virtues - Natalia Ginzburg
The Story of a Marriage - Andrew Sean Greer
The Stars, The Snow, The Fire - John Haines
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Lost in Translation - Eva Hoffman
Cowboys Are My Weakness - Pam Houston
Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Egg and I - Betty MacDonald
West with the Night - Beryl Markham
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Literary Occasions - V.S. Naipaul
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
'Tis Herself - Maureen O'Hara
Jacob Have I Loved - Katherine Paterson
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Bad Mother - Ayelet Waldman
Forgive Me - Amanda Eyre Ward
Girl Meets God - Lauren F. Winner
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
Books I Really Ought to Have Read By Now
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Shining - Stephen King
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul
You Must Remember This - Joyce Carol Oates
1984 - George Orwell
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Audrey Camp
I'm an American expat and freelance writer living in Oslo, Norway with my husband. I love language, adventure, dogs and classic movies.
