BOOK REVIEWS
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After rereading Doyle’s “The Lost World,” I decided to reread another Lost World tale, this one The Land that Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Unlike many boys my age, I never read any Edgar Rice Burroughs (or Hardy Boys for that matter) when I was young. Tarzan was familiar, of course, from television, the Read more
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In challenging times, hope is essential and yet difficult to always find. Here are some quotes about St. Francis and the nature of hope and religion from The Road to Assisi, by Paul Sabatier. On the Reformation:“The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book for that of the priest; it is a change of Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on November 4, 2011. I have been thinking lately of poems about stars or poems where lines about stars figure prominently. There are many. For the month of November, MontanaWriter will be featuring a few old and new favorite-poems Read more
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This fall I was apparently in the mood to reread old favorites. That meant, as I have reviewed them here, books like Dracula, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of course, Sherlock Holmes. For today I am reviewing another old favorite that is a different kind of creation from the imagination Read more
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When I reread poets, I like to reread the same volume I first read. I like to see my old notes and the lines I underlined 10, 20, 30, 40+ years ago, and to add new marks and notes. I do the same when I read the Bible. I have an old New Oxford RSV Read more
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I write this as I am sitting in Ames, Iowa, at the Ames Public Library. It is Pride Day here in Ames, and the library seems to be its operational headquarters. Outside along the street and down the adjacent intersecting downtown streets, there are many booths, a big stage, and everywhere you look, people in Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on November 12, 2011. At the end of the Victorian era, nationalistic literary movements sprang up in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish movement and its writers are, of course, well known. But the same kind of Read more
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IIn my reading life, I have never been far away from Sherlock Holmes. I often and routinely re-read Dr. Watson’s wonderful accounts of the Great Detective’s cases. My habit over the decades has been to regularly return to Dr. Watson’s narratives, so lovingly collected by the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The world owes an Read more
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Journey to the Center of the Earth starts with a quirky, excitable German professor named Otto Lidenbrock, who discovers an old Icelandic manuscript with a mysterious coded message. When his patient, good-natured nephew Axel helps to decode it, and they realize it describes a secret path leading deep into the Earth’s interior. Lidenbrock, being the kind of man Read more
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Daphne du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn follows the story of Mary Yellan, a young woman who, after her mother’s death, travels to the isolated Jamaica Inn on the bleak moors of Cornwall to live with her only surviving relative, her Aunt Patience. She is immediately met with a foreboding atmosphere. The once-lively Patience is now a timid, Read more
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