Join me over at Entering the Enchanted Castle for a review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Malafrena. Le Guin was a brilliant author of science fiction and fantasy, but she also wrote a number of completely realistic tales set in the imagined Eastern European country of Orsinia. Put away your expectations of spaceships and […]
Join me over at Entering the Enchanted Castle for a review of one of my favorite books about the theatre, Act One by Moss Hart. It’s a marvelous story of a kid growing up in a poor family in the Bronx, and how he made his theatrical dreams come true. Click here for the full […]
Happy New Year! It’s sure to be another challenging one, but as long as we are still able to share our reading lives, there will be something to be glad about. As the Emerald City Book Review comes to a close, please join me at my other blog, Entering the Enchanted Castle, where my giveaway […]
January 2020 feels like it took place more than a year ago, but by the calendar of ordinary time, it’s just been twelve months. And thus it’s time to choose my “Gems of 2020,” which will be my last list of favorites here at the Emerald City Book Review. For my reading and blogging plans […]
Dear friends, it’s almost time to say goodbye to The Emerald City Book Review. I invite you all to join me in the New Year over at my other blog, Entering the Enchanted Castle. I’ll be moving all my book blogging activity over there, along with sharing thoughts about life, language, and other magical things. […]
As the year comes to a close, here’s a review of how I did on my challenges — which I kept to a minimum this year, not wanting to overdo it. And I’m quite happy with how I did, so that was a success! I finished six books for Back to the Classics: Classic with […]
As I mentioned in my discussion post this week, What is the best of the Emerald City Book Review? I’ve been compiling a book of my own favorite posts from seven years of this blog, as I prepare to transition over to a new blogging home. This has been a great pleasure for me, and […]
It’s been almost seven years since I hit “publish” here at the Emerald City Book Review. My first posts were taken from some that I’d written for the now-vanished online magazine, The Green Man Review — starting on January 1, 2014 with this review of Howl’s Moving Castle. I didn’t have much of a […]
This year I was very happy to participate in Nonfiction November, having read a lot of great nonfiction and eager to share with other readers. It was a wonderful event! I did not get a lot of new reading done. Besides finishing and reviewing Danubia for Nonfiction November, I was mostly reading through the Queen’s […]
Simon Winder, Danubia (2014) You might think that a book subtitled “a personal history of Habsburg Europe” would be quite distant from our current preoccupations, would be dusty, nostalgic and quaint, irrelevant to the challenges we face today. You would be wrong. This is a chronicle of the last few hundred years of the eastern […]