Seventeenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. What could one want from a historical yet fictional novel? That it be accurate when it is talking of history and that it be filled with spectacular fictional tales. In Foucalt’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco delivers on both counts. This is a book that is full of historical facts and some amazing conspiracy theories. There are so many of them, that every other line has a reference to some obscure cult or secret organization with events that […]
Metaphorical poetry masquerading as prose
Sixteenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. This is a feeler’s book. While you’re reading this book, you don’t think through the story, you feel your way through it. You are taken on an epic journey through a century of existence – subdued passions, resigned fates, a grudging surrender to the onslaught of time that is made inevitable by the mere act of existing. You will feel the layers of time peel away and color your senses with their distinctive hues, as seen […]
Release the Hounds
The year is 1018. King Cnut of Denmark is ruling England. He’s in Oxford to collect payment and to try to unite the various groups living in England. This means there’s hundreds of people living in tents. People who were recently at war with each other. People not necessarily happy with their new king. And then there’s a murder. The king is accused by the victim’s wife. Winston, an illuminator/painter and his companion former nobleman Halfdan, accidentally find themselves investigating the murder. They need to […]
Chick lit + historical adventure romance with spies = a very entertaining read
Eloise Kelly is an American history student trying to find material for her dissertation in England. Enamoured with the dashing gentleman spies of the late 18th and early 19th Century, like the Scarlet Pimpernel and his successor the Purple Gentian, what Eloise really wants to do is unmask the identity of the most elusive spy of all, the Pink Carnation, who is rumoured to have stopped Napoleon’s invasion of England in 1803. When Eloise is allowed to browse through a cache of letters and diaries […]
A rake and a matchmaker fight, then fall in love
Lady Belinda Featherstone was a young American heiress whose marriage didn’t exactly work out splendidly, with her husband both blatantly cheating on her and squandering as much of her money as possible before having the good grace to die and leave her a widow. Now supporting herself as a matchmaker for other young American heiresses wanting to make a successful match into English nobility, Belinda is determined that none of her charges ever end up making as disastrous a match as she. So when she […]
From Victorian London to Victorian Ankh-Morpork
I love Terry Pratchett’s books. They’ve got me through the first raw days after breakups, through long train and plane journeys away from people I love, through the gloom of having a cold at the beginning of spring when the world is bursting with light and colour. I love the eerie technology of the clacks in Going Postal, the blood and fire of Carpe Jugulum, the pain and anger and sweetness of the Tiffany Aching sequence, the terrible beauty of Lords and Ladies, and the […]
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