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Read in the Blue Line

Tayla’s twists and turns

Renate Wildermuth’s wonderful new novel begins with precocious narrator Talya telling us of her last year of high school: “I had about 6,936 hours to go until I graduated from high school; if you don’t want to do the math, it was the first day of my senior year. It was a miserable ...

Adirondack advocacy and love for the land

David Gibson’s new biography, “A Force for Nature: Paul Schaefer’s Adirondack Coalitions,” brings attention to an important advocate for the Adirondack Park. Brought up in Schenectady, Schaefer’s focus began in the Warren County community of Bakers Mills, where his family bought a ...

The art of wilderness navigation

Imagine it’s 1851. You and a companion, both aspiring landscape artists captivated by the Romantic principles of the Hudson River School of painting, are trekking across the central Adirondacks, west to east, in search of inspiration and subject material. It’s a nearly trackless, almost ...

Tales of hauntings, apparitions and spirits

For readers who love short stories, especially ones about local ghosts, “Adirondack Ghost Stories” is packed with 15 of them in a little over 200 pages. The reading level appeals to a wide range of ages from middle school to adults. Edited by Dennis Webster, who contributed “Chocolate ...

A tragedy in the Adirondacks

I received two recent prompts to read Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel about a murder in the Adirondacks. A friend whose taste I trust recommended it, having picked it up because a grandchild was reading it for school. And in her Adirondack Life essay about novels set in the Adirondacks, Amy ...

Hitting the roads

I’m hesitant to review travel guides. I’ve written a few of my own, and I don’t want to be accused of any bias. Many turn out to be listings that someone could do entirely at a computer station without visiting many of the places described. Others simply don’t offer information in ...