Someone suggested we read this as a book club selection but figured “they were the last person on Earth to not have read it” but I was apparently living under a rock as I hadn’t even heard of Clarke’s magical read. With the pending BBC miniseries I was eager to see what all the buzz was about and was not disappointed. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are two magicians in England in the 1800s who are destined to bring magic back to England, the premise […]
All About Bette
Ironically I received two copies of Dark Victory for Christmas this past December but didn’t manage to read either copy until now. The (only) problem with receiving 18 books between December and my birthday in March is it takes forever to get through them all, particularly if you continue to borrow books from relatives. Dark Victory combined two of my favorite things: Old Hollywood and true stories of bad ass women. This is a pretty straightforward biography; it is well researched and goes from birth […]
Oh yeah, more medieval murder mysteries
The Medieval Murderers are a group of writers who, you guessed it, write medieval murder mysteries. There are a series of books, with a rotating cast of authors and characters. Each book is based around a theme, and each author writes about the theme (or object, or whatever) in his or her time period. In this book, all of the stories revolve around what may be the relics of King Arthur – which are sacred, especially to the Welsh. The bones are initially discovered in […]
Tell The World
Last year I read and enjoyed Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity for Cannonball Read 6 and the Go Fug Yourself Book club on Goodreads. There was much about Wein’s work with that novel that worked very well and the level of craftsmanship in the character and world building as well as the intricacies of the plot put Rose Under Fire, her second book set in the same world, immediately on my to read list for this year. I wish I could say that Rose lived […]
Totalitarianism, up close and personal in post-Mao China
The Vagrants has got to be one of the grimmest novels I’ve read this year, and yet it is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The author grew up in Beijing of the late 1970s, the tumultuous post-Mao period in a China which had emerged from the horrific Cultural Revolution without plans to replace it with anything positive. The population was splintered between those whose humanity had been virtually destroyed by the bludgeon of Maoist doctrine, those who were struggling to enter the modern […]
Lovely Jenny Lee.
I came to Call the Midwife, the first book in Jennifer Worth’s series of nursing memoirs set in post-WWII East End of London, in an ass-backwards way. I had seen the entire series as it aired on PBS, and then again as it was released on DVD, before I happened upon a copy of this first volume in a used bookstore. The show is remarkably faithful to the books, so all of the stories that are featured here I already knew. And I was still riveted by them. […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 610
- 611
- 612
- 613
- 614
- …
- 677
- Next Page »