ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

BOOK REVIEWS

  • This House is Haunted by John Boyne

    The Literary Ghost Story is a noble tradition: The “Signal-Man” and Dickens play an important role John Boyne’s novel This House is Haunted.  It is a well-written “Victorian” ghost story featuring London fog, numerous literary references, and a mysterious country manor. Before the arbitrary distinctions of genre vs. literary fiction, many great writers tried their hand at… Read more

  • The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

    Like all genres, Horror runs the spectrum from great writing to less-than-great writing. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill falls squarely in the former category in every possible way. The novel is narrated by Arthur Kipps, who is recalling a terrifying experience from his past. Many years earlier, while working as a junior solicitor,… Read more

  • Friday’s Food for Thought: Virginia Woolf

    Happy Friday! Here is a quote by Virginia Woolf to carry into your weekend. There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.… Read more

  • The Mummy MegaPack

    Growing up I regularly watched Saturday matinee movies on television with my brother and my cousins on winter and rainy days. If it was summer, or the weather good, we were expected to be outside in the afternoons, out of the way of  my mom and my various aunts. But if the weather was bad,… Read more

  • Dracula by Bram Stoker

    Dracula is one of those books that everyone knows but few probably actually read much anymore. The details of Castle Dracula, Transylvania, Count Dracula, bats, wolves, sleeping in a coffin, casting no reflection in a mirror, fear of garlic and crucifixes, stakes through the heart, and all the others vampire cliches are well known. They… Read more

  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

    A classic of the genre, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is the story of a haunted mansion where a group of people gather to investigate the supernatural. Led by Dr. John Montague, they include Eleanor Vance, a shy woman, Theodora, a bohemian artist, and Luke Sanderson, the young heir. Despite the house’s… Read more

  • Photo Friday: Literary Synchronicity

    Like London, Dublin is one of those cities that seems to be filled with literary history. Turn a corner and there you are at some building that some writer once lived in. I was not looking for Sheridan Le Fanu shrines in May of 2020 but by luck just stumbled across this one. It is… Read more

  • Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

    Twenty-five years before Bram Stoker wrote and published Dracula, the novella Camilla was published by another Irishman, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Like Dracula, Le Fanu’s Carmilla features a vampire. But this one is quite different than Stoker’s famous Count. Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young girl living in a secluded castle. She recounts her… Read more

  • An Indiscriminate Reader

    I must confess that I have become an indiscriminate reader as I have grown older. Early in my reading life, during my teens and 20s, I read exclusively what is commonly referred to as “Literary Fiction” (admittedly a snobbish and parochial term). At some point though that changed. Now, I read whatever fiction catches my… Read more

  • ALL-STAR BREAK – Little Libraries

    As I bike, and as Sue and I take urban hikes in Minneapolis and St. Paul and other towns, we often come across Little Libraries. I always take a look at what is offered and usually take a picture or two. If the books are not interesting the library itself often is. I once played… Read more