Julia Sneden
Julia Sneden is a writer, friend, wife, mother, Grandmother, care-giver and Senior Women Web's Resident Observer. Her career has included editorial work for Sunset Magazine, 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios as well as teaching. Julia is a passionate opponent of this country’s educational system, which she feels is floundering. She lives in North Carolina. jbsneden can be reached by email (at) triad.rr.com
Julia Sneden's archive of articles.
On Looking Forward to Summer and Good Beach Reads
Oh, and one more thing: a true beach read must be one that you can pass along, which is why ours are almost always paperbacks. When you’ve found a satisfying beach read, others will request your copy as soon as you’re through with it, probably because you’ve been recounting your delight at the dinner table (an obnoxious habit, that, but I’ve had some good reads out of it). If you’ve been emphatic enough with your praise, the book will travel from hand to hand, and probably wind up going home with someone else. more »
Love Your Library
A child who loves to read may beg for just a few more minutes so that she can finish the chapter before lights-out. If you refuse her, she may well sneak a flashlight and her book under the covers. It’s a minor dilemma, but a parent must ultimately decide: do you punish the deception, or do you just wait a bit, and then quietly remove the flashlight and book from underneath the sleeping child? more »
Culture Watch, March 2010
Joan Cannon, Jill Norgren and Julia Sneden Review: Kristin Hannah's The Winter Gardenis a slightly flawed but enjoyable tale about people who fit the fiction, but some of them perhaps not quite to the life; Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Won… more »
February's CultureWatch
Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale published by Vintage is an early non-fiction work by the noted Indian novelist (whose work The Glass Palace is a favorite of mine). Ghosh wrote In an Antique Land after living in 1980 as a graduate student in an Egyptian farming village. He excavates a little known aspect of Middle Eastern history in a book that moves back and forth from the 12th century to the 20th, detecting and describing the interactions, real and imagined, of an Indian slave and local Egyptian merchants, holy men, and sorcerers.Gardeners and lovers of mysteries will be pleased to learn that several of the books of British born (John) Beverley Nichols have been re-issued by Timber Press. In Down the Garden Path, I chortled at lines such as "I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl." I expect the same witty, high-spirited writing in Merry Hall. And if I wish my flowers served up with a bit of murder and sleuthing, Nichols' detective novel, *The Moonflower, praised by novelists Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen, also rests on my to-read pile. more »
