On rare occasion, the former journalist comes out in me. Today, I had the pleasure to interview author Christopher Swan about his new book and what motivates an action-adventure novelist. Tell me about Blood for Treasure? The elevator pitch is…it’s a modern adventure about a clandestine expedition tasked with capturing the world’s first and only […]

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As you may recall from an earlier post, I excitedly dove into reading Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Well, it has been struggle ever since chapter 1 when the excitement and nostalgia wore off. But now that I am halfway through this 600+ page book it has dawned on me – […]

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If you’re a dinosaur, all of your friends are dead. If you’re a pirate, all of your friends have scurvy. If you’re a tree, all of your friends are end tables. Each page of this laugh-out-loud illustrated humor book showcases the downside of being everything from a clown to a cassette tape to a zombie. […]

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“I was thumbing through New Mexico with nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in with a shaman named Shaman who pricked a hole in my mind. A little prick it was, but everything gushed in through it, and everything spilled out. Suddenly, I could not tell the difference between myself and others or between my […]

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Each year, approximately 25 million trees are used to make books sold in the United States—over 1,000 times the number of trees in New York City’s Central Park. Many of these trees are sourced from endangered forests with environmental impacts on the people and wildlife that rely on them. Fortunately the book industry is rapidly […]

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The Vatican today made the attempted ordination of women one of the gravest crimes under church law, putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors. Seriously? How is allowing women to answer the divine call to become priests as sinful as molesting a child? I have no idea what Biblical reasoning […]

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A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once […]

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I saw Shutter Island at the dollar theater the other day (Of course tickets are $2, but “two dollar theater” is not nearly as catchy.) Shutter Island is Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a US Marshal investigating an escape from a mental facility for the criminally insane. It was pretty fascinating – […]

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Ella. One day she went out and picked a pretty flower. She did not know that a monster was hiding behind the tree, watching her. Ella went home and her mommy helped her put the pretty flower in a vase. But that night the monster […]

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No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of […]

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