A Janus coin When I started blogging a year ago, I didn’t really have any particular goals in mind, other than to start posting and see what happened. Looking back, there are some things I’m really pleased with and would like to continue into 2015, and some things that I’d like to work on. For […]
I heard about the Back to the Classics challenge too late to join last year, so I was glad when Karen of Books and Chocolate decided to host it again. Visit the sign-up post for the full rules, but basically the idea is to read and post about 6-12 classics (pre-1965) in different categories during […]
Angela Thirkell, The Brandons (1939) After reading Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, I was curious to read some of the novels that Angela Thirkell set in the same (imaginary) county of Barsetshire. Starting in 1933 and extending through World War II and into the 1950s, she chronicled the lives and loves of several interlinked circles of […]
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) Image: “Merry Old Santa” by Thomas Nast (Public Domain Review)
Northanger Abbey, by the Balbussos The Emerald City Book Review is just about one year old, and I’ve done 100 posts! To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to look at the archives and see what have been the ten most popular posts in my first year of blogging (giveaways excluded). Perhaps unsurprisingly, they […]
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868-9) What makes Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women immortal, when as a nineteenth-century moral story for the young it should properly have been forgotten long ago? A portion of the reading population might like to forget it, as Elaine Showalter points out in her illuminating introduction to my Penguin […]
It’s time for an end-of-year roundup! With this post, I’m introducing the Emerald City Book Review Gem, to be awarded to my favorite books of the year in various genres and categories. (Note that books were read and reviewed, but not necessarily published in 2014.) Click on each title to be taken to my original […]
Elizabeth Goudge, I Saw Three Ships (1969) Just in time for Christmas, the wonderful folks at David R. Godine, Publisher have reprinted their edition of Elizabeth Goudge’s story I Saw Three Ships. In this brief tale set in the West Country of England a couple of centuries ago, we are introduced to the irrepressible […]
Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) Willa Cather’s quiet, elegaic final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is the only one of her novels set in her birthplace of rural Northern Virginia. Taking up events and characters from the author’s own family history, it gives us a window into a time and […]
He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living, — surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and glittered and sumptuously […]