By Louis L’Amour   Sentimentality… Is there a book that takes your breath away every time you hear or read the title? Or one that breaks through the bricks walls holding the files of your past, releasing a flood of memories and emotions? Louis L’Amour’s 1970 novel Reilly’s Luck does that for me.   I was introduced to Louis L’Amour’s writing by my second mom, Jan Federson, when I was about 11 or 12 years old. Jan, and her husband, Feddy, lived in a large walkout rambler near McCoy Lake in Eden Prairie, when all the roads off Mitchell Road…

By Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston was a female black writer in the early 20th century, and she wrote this novel in 1937.   In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie tells her story to her best friend Phoebe, from her first forced marriage when she was a teenager to living with the love of her life in her 40s. It tells of her relationships, describing the three totally different men she lived with, and the adventures incurred throughout her life. The majority of the book takes place in Eatonville, a town in Florida near Jacksonville that was incorporated on August…

By Leonard Nimoy   Star Trek has been infiltrating my life for as long as I can remember. I watched the original series as a child, and the movies as a teen and adult. My husband loves the original Star Trek, and enjoys the more recent Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. Captains Kirk, Picard and Janeway all have different attributes, which makes each of the series unique and interesting.   One of the icon characters of Star Trek is Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, who died at the end of February. Nimoy introduced the Vulcan hand…

By Barbara Mackinnon Where Rivers Meet has it all-sorrow, love, romance, murder, conflict, scenic settings and friendship. It is a romance novel where two emotionally injured people meet by chance and find they can love again. Their individual stories and family conflicts of their pasts continue to surface as they build their relationship. The story starts in Dunkeld, Scotland, where Mary Sinclair and her husband, Stewart, are visiting?his aunt Fiona. Being from the United States, Mary is enchanted with the city and the countryside. She takes up painting as Stewart travels, where he dies. Mary plummets into grief and is…

Edited by Kent Nerburn This book is filled with quotes and speeches that give the reader an inside look at the wisdom, spirituality and culture of the Native American people. When the Europeans arrived, this continent was filled with various tribes of people whose customs, languages and housing were different. The different tribes governed themselves and lived according to different rules.?But, according to Nerburn, they all shared a common belief that the earth is a spiritual presence that “must be honored, not mastered.” Nerburn’s book looks at how the Native Americans approached life. Part 1 includes quotes compiled from various…

By Rev. James E. (Jimmy Mac) McNamara An easy read, “Tales form the Wedding Altar” takes the reader through various true stories from weddings Rev. Jimmy Mac has performed in Lass Vegas over the last four years. Some of the stories are heartwarming and some embarrassing, but the majority leave the reader chuckling. The stories are short, which makes the book easy to read in spurts. I kept it in my lunch box and read it during my breaks at work. It was a fun read.