Random Connect Points:
Reba's Stories

Another historical fiction for the win with “ The First Ladies ” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. After I really enjoyed “The Personal Librarian” earlier in the summer, this newest book by the same authors piqued my interest. This is the story of friendship, political will, and a passion for righting wrongs that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Black activist Mary McLeod Bethune shared.  Many of the issues familiar in today’s culture – race, gender and divisive politics - played a big role in how these two women made their way through their individual and shared lives. Together, they wielded a behind-the-scenes power that changed the course of the civil rights movement in our country. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune’s lives ran parallel and intersected repeatedly both in spite of and because of their shared vision for civil rights, equal education and social justice in the country. Plus, they forged a personal friendship that crossed racial lines unh...

Ten years ago this summer, I sat at the kitchen table at the beach and finally put together a blog for my writing. It wasn’t a pretty site. My design skills were non-existent. The design options for an amateur like me were minimal. At that point, it was just going to be a place for me to catalog my published writing and maybe post a few personal pieces I wrote. Ten years and 162 posts later, I’ve finally gotten around to a reboot of Random Connect Points thanks to another quiet week at the kitchen table at the beach. I can’t say my design skills have improved but the options available to an amateur designer have increased. Maybe one day I'll get around to properly tagging posts and photos so the search feature will work, but for now, I'm happy with this! My beloved yellow bike continues to grace the cover photo. The more modern “hamburger” drop down menu cuts down on clutter on the landing page. I’ve chosen a simple white background with a fun headline font. And finally afte...

Every year, I dust off this “first day of first grade” photo taken in front of then-Crayton Elementary School. It makes me thankful for these girls and the many other friends who have walked with me, loved me and showed up for me along the way.  First day of first grade. Crayton Elementary  These five little girls became friends as very young children primarily because of proximity living in the same neighborhood.  (Front row: Libby Heath, Nora McArthur Fowles. Back row: Katherine DuBose Duvall, Nancy Marchant Harris, Reba Hull Campbell).  Our mothers were friends, too, because of proximity, church and family connections. I’ll always be grateful to our moms for the playgroups, carpools, spend-the-night adventures, the “six for $24 dress specials” from White’s at Richland Mall, birthday parties, watchful eyes and family trips that we all probably took for granted. By the time these five little girls reached this first day of first grade milestone, we’d known each ...

Stories of local folks who’ve found national acclaim always interest me. And if they’re in the world of journalism or politics even more so. That’s part of the reason I picked up Craig Melvin’s book, "Pops," on a recent trip to the Richland Library. While I don’t know Craig personally, we’ve got enough mutual friends that I feel a little kinship with his story. While this book focuses on Craig's path to the Today show set, it’s more than just his professional story. This book explores his journey to understand and accept an unaccountable father who battled alcoholism and who wasn’t very present in Craig’s growing up years. The timing of the book lines up with Craig’s own journey as a father to his young children, Delano and Sybil. Craig’s storytelling skills from years in television translate nicely to the page with a writing style that’s conversational and descriptive without sugarcoating the challenges his family faced. He deftly balances facing down the demons he d...

“The Personal Librarian” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray was such a delightful surprise. Historical fiction isn’t normally my top reading choice, but to stay true to one of my summer reading goals, I’m trying out new genres and new writers. This one was spot on. The book follows the life of a young woman in the early 1900s who is hired by the mega-wealthy financier JP Morgan to be the personal librarian for his extensive manuscript and art collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. While this was a perfectly acceptable type of position for an unmarried young white woman of the time, the intriguing story line of the book is based around the fact that Belle da Costa Greene is actually Belle Marion Greener, a Black woman. The book builds from Belle’s family story that includes her father, Richard Greener, the first Black Harvard graduate who spent his life as an activist for equal rights. Belle’s father leaves the family over the fact that her mother...

I’ve long been a collector of travel guides. There’s a stack on my bookshelf of books about Spain, Mexico, Italy, Thailand, France, England, Scotland, Israel and Egypt among others. Then I stopped buying travel guides somewhere in the mid-2010s when the internet put travel planning at my fingertips in real time. In today’s digital world, old fashioned travel books may seem to be obsolete. Who wants to travel with a 300-page book when the same info is available right on your phone? Not to mention, so much of the info in a hard-copy travel guide is outdated the day it’s published. For recent post-covid travel, however, I’ve become a fan of travel guides again. I enjoy going to the library and checking out a stack of books about my travel destination. I vicariously pre-travel to my destination running fingers over the colorful maps, pondering the adventures to be had in various parts of a new city. Then I pick my favorite book of the bunch and buy a copy at the local bookstore (my lat...

"Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" by Scottish writer Gail Honeyman caught my eye at the library on a book display for Mental Health Awareness Month. The cover and the title drew me in (although I ended up “reading” as an audiobook on a driving trip – the accent of the Scottish main character is spot-on). At the beginning of the book, Eleanor appears to be an eccentric young woman with a one-dimensional, rigid, and highly judgmental world view. She seems to take every experience and interaction so literally that she can’t fathom why a barista would need to know her name when ordering coffee. She's baffled at why anyone would have reason to eat in a restaurant where food is more expensive and more likely to have been touched by unclean hands. I felt the book started slow, but, as it progressed, I realized the tempo was probably part of the author’s scene-setting to lay out Eleanor’s narrow world perspective. Bit by bit, Honeyman brings the reader into the story of ...