Moby Dick Mondays – Week 9

Ti of the blog Book Chatter is sponsoring a challenge/readalong to read the classic Moby Dick. On Mondays, we’ll be posting about our progress. I am listening to the unabridged audiodisks for this book. Our narrator Ishmael next describes in detail a couple of “gams” – but not in the way you might think! A [...]

Sunday Salon – Review of “Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire” by Peter Hopkirk

Note: This book is reviewed by my husband Jim. Peter Hopkirk has written extensively on the efforts of the British Empire to maintain its control of the Indian subcontinent from incursions from the north and west. In Like Hidden Fire, he traces the clandestine efforts of Germany and Turkey in the First World War to [...]

Review of St. Peter’s Fair: The Fourth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters

July, 1139 is the time of the 3-day St. Peter’s Fair, a large yearly trading fair that takes place on the grounds of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul at Shrewsbury. The previous year’s fair was cancelled because Shrewsbury was under siege during the civil strife between the forces of King Stephen and [...]

Unfinished Friday – Bolaño’s 2666

Unfinished Friday is a meme made up by that fantastic writer of literary reviews, Marie at The Boston Bibliophile. The idea is to inform readers about books you did not finish, and let them know why. If you peruse any menu at a top-rated restaurant, you will see entres like stuffed leg of guinea hen [...]

Guest Post by Author Linda Gillard and Giveaway of Emotional Geology

I am pleased to be able to feature another guest post by U.K. author Linda Gillard. She gives you some background on the writing of her lovely book, Emotional Geology (see my review here), and is also offering a giveaway of one copy to one lucky reader in the U.S. or U.K. To enter, please [...]

Review of Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer

Joan Bauer has won multiple awards for her young adult fiction. The heroine in this book, Jenna Boller, is a down-to-earth, self-consciously tall 16-year-old teenager who is more mature than her years. She has had to help raise her younger sister since her now-single mother works the night shift as a nurse to support the [...]

Review of Scream for Me by Karen Rose

This book falls into the genre of “romantic suspense,” a genre I ordinarily eschew. But I won this book in a contest, so there it was, calling out to me from my TBR pile. It was interesting to realize that if you excised all the scenes involving “romantic” encounters between “ruggedly handsome” Daniel Vartanian and [...]

Moby Dick Mondays – Week 8

Ti of the blog Book Chatter is sponsoring a challenge/readalong to read the classic Moby Dick. On Mondays, we’ll be posting about our progress. I am listening to the unabridged audiodisks for this book. Ishmael, our narrator, decides it is finally time to fill us in on Moby Dick. First he describes him physically, and [...]

Sunday Salon – Review of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter by Peter Manseau

This book is a superlative tale of two intersecting lives that takes place amid a swirl of words and languages and the alphabets that produce them. The result is such a melodious harmony of coincidences that you will feel as if you are at a transcendent orchestral performance of literature. I was thrilled to discover [...]

Review of Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

This Newbery Winner for Young Adults was the perfect book to follow my reading of Kristin Lavransdatter and Dooms Day Book, for it tells much the same story but from the point of view of a fourteen-year old girl. Catherine’s diary of the year 1290 is meant to show 21st century readers just what girls [...]