Author Archives: hadassahalderson

In The Lobster Books, I have entered what amounts of “Volume II: The Curious Lobster’s Island.” I have read up to page 298 of The Lobster Books and the book is just shy of 450 pages. Reading Richard Hatch’s book, I find this profound truth of all of childhood’s best loved books, Old things andContinue reading “Rediscovering Mr. Lobster”

I began rereading The Lobster Books yesterday, and tonight have gotten to page 92. I try to read 100 pages a day, but oh well… The Lobster Book may be a little too sweet to be the book it was compared to–The Wind and the Willows. I have not read it since childhood, but IContinue reading “Revisiting Mr. Lobster”

When I am called up to read the blessing before the scroll is read, I am always called Hadassah bat Avraham. Hadassah is Esther’s Hebrew name, which I picked for myself as a convert. I picked it because as a child the Book of Esther was my favorite story in the Hebrew Bible. Grandma AldersonContinue reading “My Father was a Wandering Aramean”

Lately I have thought of my childhood favorite authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Why? Because though I thought I had worked my way out of it, I believe that I have had a relapse of spirit in a way… when I was a child I feared that I bore the taint of sin… and I always believedContinue reading “This Poor Man Cries to God”

In Great Expectations–in which Bertrand Russell said Dickens officially apologies those he felt he had “sold out” in his rise to fame and success–Dickens tries not only to relive his own life’s follies pitfalls, but also explore what it means to be a good person. Joe Gargery is both the man who comes to personifyContinue reading “The Importance of Being a Gentleman”

Though I loved books as a kid, it was only late in grade school that I spent a roughly equal time of my day reading as playing with my “My-Little-Ponies” on the floor. However, one year Mom, my stepdad, and I went to our first Riverfest. Riverfest was a celebration of the River that goesContinue reading “My Childhood’s Bold Discovery”

[Our Civilization] has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies noneContinue reading “To Err is Human, to Really Make a Mistake, You Need a Computer”

I wrote a few days ago about my inner Kaleidoscope and me. What I long to say to somebody–and so I will bare my soul to the world–is that the ugly truth is that a person with Bipolar–and I am one–is only partly affected by forces outside the self. No, the life of the BipolarContinue reading “My Kaleidoscope and Me”

Somehow this evening I was thinking of Brazil–one of my first books–and the spin-offs I hope to write. Of course, I am not altogether sure why: the book has so few fans among my friends. Yet I am in love with the book and its characters, that I must–at some point–write more. The first bookContinue reading “Stories-within-Stories”

In the Middle Ages, Catholic clergymen would refer to the “dark nights of the soul” the bleakness before the dawn of revelation, when doubt and despair comingled–not just these things in terms of God but also of the Self. The chasm between the individual soul and the enlightenment of faith seemed unfathomable… because the SelfContinue reading “A Writer’s Meditation on Evil and Creativity”