BOOK REVIEWS
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I am a huge fan of Susan Hill’s ghost stories, especially her masterpiece The Woman in Black. I have had her Simon Serrailler Detective Series on my To-Be-Read list for a long time. The only reason I hadn’t started it years ago is because I was “saving” it for the time when I would need a great mystery. Finally, in early November, I caved. Read more
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I have lost count now of how many times I have actually read this classic adventure. Yet in October, I got an urge yet again to give Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson another rereading. Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle are the prose writers who have the most amount of work that I regularly find myself returning to Read more
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Context is important for me. Works of creation, athletic greatness, life-itself does not happen in a vacuum. There is always context. And where there is context there is influence. One of the things I created for myself years ago is a something I call “Writers/Artists in Context.” It is something I refer to often when Read more
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Book: The Last Kind Words Saloon, by Larry McMurtry Style: Western-Mythish Plot: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and other historical western characters like Buffalo Bill Cody and Charles Goodnight interact with fictional characters in a mythic West. Lines from the Opening Paragraphs: A hat came skipping down the main street of Long Grass, propelled only by the wind, which Read more
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“You are a traveller in little things–in something very small–which takes you into the villages and hamlets, where you meet and converse with small farmers, innkeepers, labourers and their wives, with other persons who live on the land. In this way you get to hear a good deal about rent and cost of living, and Read more
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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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