BOOK REVIEWS
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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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I have been thinking a lot about why we love and read Ghost Stories, Horror Novels, etc. Here are a few ideas I have come up with: The Thrill of the Safe Scare or “Why fear feels good” Meeting the Monster Within or “How Horror is a mirror to the human psyche” Fear as Connection Read more
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Like Stoker’s novel Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic-Horror novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a familiar and foundational work of Horror that is much different from the story that has become part of our collective imaginations. And for that same reason. like Dracula it is a book that is good Read more
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“I believe that every one who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something — tea, or coffee, or tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly supplied in such occupations, or that we should grow too abstracted, and the mind, as Read more
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