Book Reviews
-
The best quote I know about the fickle nature of affection comes from W.B. Yeats. Quoting his father, who may very well have been quoting Balzac, Yeats wrote: “A man does not love a woman because he thinks her clever or because he admires her, but because he likes the way she has of scratching Read more
-
As any reader knows, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book the first or second time you pick it up. Yet if you pick that same book up at a later date and start reading you may actually fall in love with it. I have noticed that music works the same way for me Read more
-
Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Penguin Classics) (p. viii). Penguin Publishing Read more
-
In the summer of 1984, I drove a 1964 Galaxy 500 (Deluxe Sport Coupe) 1713 miles from Dillon, Montana to Saginaw, Michigan with only one companion – a beat-up paperback edition of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. The radio was original with the car. In eastern Montana and western North Dakota I could seldom pick Read more
-
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ~Haruki Murakami With October rapidly drawing to a close, I will be transitioning to Book Reviews of other genres and to Poetry Reviews. I am the kind of person who needs to let things sit Read more
-
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
-
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
-
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
ClimbingSky 