Tag archives: books
Sorry not sorry, but I have many excellent reads this month. Let’s start with The Cicada Tree, a debut novel by Robert Gwaltney with its melt-in-your-mouth prose, is a Southern gothic novel in the tradition of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. I was enraptured with the story of eleven-year-old Analeise, a piano protégé living in […]
I plan on starting the new year exactly as I ended it: diving into a stack of great books. I ended with 150 books for 2021, reading everything I can to help you readers navigate interesting, entertaining, and diverse books, from memoir to thriller to everything in between. Put Shauna Robinson’s Must Love Books on […]
Whether “naughty” or “nice,” I’ve got something for everyone on your list for the holidays. First, Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Executive Director Roger Durling has a gorgeous coffee-table book called Cinema In Flux: A year of Connecting Through Film, filled with essays and mouthwatering photos of Durling’s movie recommendations, all started during the pandemic. […]
We love good books, and we cannot lie! Choosing which books to give beloved friends and family, however, is not an easy task. With the holidays coming up, here are some staff picks for books that might be worthy of your consideration. For older kids and teens, it’s much more difficult to throw out titles […]
Truman Capote specialized in characters who weren’t what they seemed to be. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a happy-go-lucky party girl who struggled with the “mean reds.” In Cold Blood about ruthless killers, who were more pathetic than masterminds. And in his unfinished Answered Prayers, society women, “swans,” as he called them, envied for their wealth, beauty, […]
Elba Library is believed to have been the oldest library in the world. Historians have concluded it was built around 2500 to 2250 BC in Syria. Although they had giant clay tablets, instead of neatly bound printed paper books, archaeologists still found signs of the tablets being arranged and even classified according to content or […]
Nadia Denham runs a curio shop in a “rundown Santa Barbara mall.” Mickie Lambert works for a company that creates “digital scrapbooks” for those wishing to preserve their precious trinkets. When Nadia dies, Mickie sets out to fulfill her last wish to curate twelve mementos that cause a dormant serial killer to surface. Mickie receives […]
Expanding public library access is important to our entire community. Visitors or folks new to the area often come here first to get a sense of what Montecito is all about and to connect with a helpful person face-to-face. The Montecito Library hours are: • Tuesday and Thursday, 10 am – 5 pm • Wednesday […]
Beach reading is heating up as we move into August. Where the Truth Lies by Anna Bailey is a shatteringly emotional story with soaring prose; a page-turning thriller. Set in a remote small town in Colorado, Emma’s 17-year-old friend Abigail disappears, stirring up a town filled with decades-long secrets, fanatics, and racists. Emma forms a […]
The months of June and July have been filled with much of the excitement that we missed out on this past year; however, during these summer months when I finally get to exhale, I enjoy reading. I’m not talking about biographies or articles or historical essays — but rather books. Wonderfully scented and beautifully thought […]
You do not have to be a ballerina, or a dance mom, as I am — quick shout out to Gustafson Studios for managing an end of year, in-person ballet show — to enjoy Georgina Pazcoguin’s memoir Swan Dive: The making of a Rogue Ballerina. Pazcoguin’s rise from ABT Summer Intensive student to NYCB’s first […]
San Francisco-based photographer Jay Blakesberg is a self-confessed Deadhead whose work has appeared everywhere from Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, Relix to Time, and Vanity Fair. Over a 40-plus-year career he has taken pictures of innumerable rock legends, including the Grateful Dead, Phish, Radiohead, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, and Tom Waits, to […]
With the continued easing of pandemic restrictions, PCPA is returning after two summers to the Solvang Festival Theater, the charming outdoor amphitheater in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley village. The stars will be live on stage as well as visible in the sky above starting in mid-July, when PCPA debuts an original production […]
Montecito Library will be open four days a week starting June 1. This date marks our biggest reopening level in over a year. Our new hours will be: • Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 2-5 pm• Thursday 10 am – 4 pm Along with new hours will be a 30-minute per day maximum and new building […]
It is time to start our beach reading, even with June gloom hovering. Finding Tessa by Jaime Lynn Hendricks is a thriller with an unforeseen twist that will keep you turning pages. Tessa and Jace are in love. When Tessa goes missing, evidence against Jace mounts: blood, a gun, and an affair with a co-worker. […]
It’s no surprise that UCSB Arts & Lectures has turned to the XIV Dalai Lama for the keynote event in its year-long 2021-2022 Creating Hope programming initiative. After all, not only has His Holiness, who is believed to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, spent much of his life encouraging people to be […]
The opening sequence of UCSB Dance Department’s COVID-coping triptych of dance films shows a series of eerily empty spaces all over the seaside campus. But it’s not meant to be a metaphor or pandering to the pandemic, said artistic director Delila Moseley, a longtime professor of dance at UCSB. Moseley has been able to actually […]
Two years after it opened, the owners of Montecito’s Magic Castle Cabaret Milt and Arlene Larsen are moving on, I can exclusively reveal. “The Cabaret has been closed for a long year and we are not getting any younger,” laments Arlene. “When we started, we seemed a lot younger. “After talking it over for many […]
Prolific Santa Barbara-based children’s book author/illustrator Bruce Hale, whose 60-plus books include the Clark the Shark and the award-winning Chet Gecko mysteries series, kicks off four straight afternoons of conversations with writers about their new books hosted by Chaucer’s. The Edgar-nominated Hale, whose books also include Snoring Beauty, one of Oprah’s Recommended Reads for Kids, […]
It is every parent’s nightmare. Their child goes missing. It is 1993 and young girls are disappearing in Northern California. The New York Times bestselling author Paula McLain (The Paris Wife) makes an abrupt departure from her popular historical novels to delve into the world of suspense and crime mystery in When the Stars Go […]
