Susan Ryan-Vollmar

Welcome to my little corner of the Internet. I drink a lot of coffee, read a lot of books, lift a lot of weight, and write a lot with fountain pens.

Fountain pens: 6 brilliant pieces of art from Bungubox

I’ve been writing with fountain pens since 2015. When I started, I could not imagine paying more than $25 for a pen. Nor could I imagine owning more than two or three. My favorite was a blue Lamy Safari with a fine nib that I used every day. I ran through about three ink

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Eight Days at Yalta

Diana Preston’s Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World is an excellent, fast read. The stamina required just to travel to Yalta is mind boggling as were the conditions under which FDR, Churchill and staff resided once there. Concise, well-written summary and assessment of the negotiations that took

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Mary Wollstonecraft and Big Ideas

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics, by Sylvana Tomaselli is an accessible overview of Wollstonecraft’s entire body of work. Tomaselli places Wollstonecraft’s books and essays in the political context of her time, with the French Revolution playing a big role. Although this wasn’t a biography of Wollstonecraft, elements of Wollstonecraft as a person are included:

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Ulysses: A grail read

Lordy Jesus. So this was a “grail” read for me. A book I’ve contemplated reading for many years but never got around to tackling until I spotted this centennial edition as a guide. For others who are thinking of diving in, I cannot recommend this edition of the book more highly. The Cambridge edition

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Dispatch from the pandemic

The first thing to like about Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year is its cover: a drone’s eye view of a lawn party with individuals, couples, and pods of family/friends socially distanced from one another and outlined by thin, white circles. Finch is best when he describes the ways in

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Remember Fiona Hill?

I read Fiona Hill’s memoir, There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, thinking it was going to be a memoir of her time in the Trump Administration. It was that but so much more. Covers her childhood and adolescence growing up in the mining town Bishop Auckland in Northern

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