I haven’t been keeping up with Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, but when I saw some lists on other blogs I could not resist this topic! Here are some of my outstanding reads so far this year: The Winged Girl of Knossos The Book of Joy May Cause Love Bronze […]
If last month was a nonfiction extravaganza, this was a month for catching up with new release reviews. I hope you will check out these fantastic offerings from some of my favorite publishers. Ironically, all these “new” books were actually previously published, either recently in the UK, or many years ago and now getting a […]
Pruned Oak Oh oak tree, how they have pruned you. Now you stand odd and strangely shaped! You were hacked a hundred times until you had nothing left but spite and will! I am like you, so many insults and humiliations could not shatter my link with life. And every day I raise my head […]
I think of myself as an eclectic reader. In the last few months I’ve read fiction, historical fiction, classics, children’s books, YA, fantasy, mysteries, memoirs, diaries, romance, science fiction, nonfiction about history, science, and social issues, biographies, and more. What I have NOT read, though, is contemporary fiction — by which I mean realistic fiction […]
Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent (2016) Perhaps because the nineteenth century saw the rise of the novel as a literary form, giving us an unprecedented number of imagined narratives about daily life and relationships, there’s a particular fascination in trying to go “behind the curtain” of the period and discern what the Victorians did NOT […]
I always find something I want to read in the Candlewick catalog, and among their spring/summer releases my eye was caught by three books that all turned out to have been previously published in the UK (Candlewick is part of the UK-based Walker Book Group). In other ways, though, they were quite different — not […]
Erick Berry, The Winged Girl of Knossos (1934) Ever since Betsy Bird put this long-lost Newbery honor book from 1934 at the top of her list of underrated middle grade books I’ve been dying to read it. And lo and behold, sometimes dreams do come true! Three years later, it’s back in print thanks to […]
Today’s Armchair Book Expo topic is Dining With the Authors. “Every year at Book Expo, children and adult authors are featured during breakfast. Who would you dream of enjoying a meal with? Would it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or simply coffee? What would your meal be? What would you discuss?” I’d have a giant literary […]
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was planning to go to Book Expo this year but then changed my mind. However, I’m happy to participate in the “Armchair” version, which I discovered in my first year of blogging and have enjoyed ever since! I’m completing three of this year’s prompts for a quick […]
All my reviews this month were of quite introspective and intense books, and all nonfiction (I think that’s a first for me). But that’s not all I read! I’ve just finished the new Joan Aiken collection from Virago, The Gift Giving, and was delighted that it included some of my favorite fairy tales by […]