Sunday Salon: Literature on Stage

You’d never know it from looking at my reading list, but I am an avid theatre lover. In fact, when I was in high school, I read almost as many plays as I did novels—perhaps more. I went through a phase where my favorite things to check out of the library were volumes from The Best [...]

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The Fellowship of the Ring: Part II

Right on schedule, I’ve finished Fellowship of the Ring for the Lord of the Rings Readalong, hosted this month by Clare. I’ve already shared my thoughts on the first part of the book here. Today, I’ll be focusing on Part 2. The first part of Fellowship focused primarily on hobbits, but the second half of [...]

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The Dark is Rising (re-read)

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back, Three from the Circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, stone, Five shall return, and one go alone. On Midwinter’s Eve, the day before Will Stanton’s eleventh birthday, all he is thinking about is the approach of Christmas and all he wants [...]

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When You Reach Me

Last year when I was going through a crazy book-acquisition phase—entering giveaways, mooching, and requesting review copies all over the place—I got a copy of Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. But, as sometimes happens, my initial enthusiasm for all these shiny new books wore off, and I let this book slip further and further [...]

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The Spare Room

There are a few topics that I’m emphatically not interested in reading about. One of those is cancer. My problem is not the grimness of the topic—if you read this blog with any regularity at all, you’ll know I have no problem with grimness. No, my problem is the sentimentality of so many cancer narratives. [...]

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The Keeper of the Bees (re-read)

The Keeper of the Bees is another novel I turned to for comfort reading while I was sick. Gene Stratton Porter is, to my mind, an unjustly neglected novelist: almost no one I know has read anything by her, but she has a whole list of wonderful early 20th-century American books, including A Girl of [...]

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Sunday Salon: It Gets them Reading, Right?

A while back, I was browsing in Barnes and Noble, and I wandered into the YA section. The table I saw was filled with Twilight book and movie promotional stuff. I’m not even sure there was a book on that table—I was too bewildered by all the glistening vampire chests and werewolf abs. I hurried past to [...]

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The Devil’s Horse (Morland Dynasty #16)

Another month, another Morland Dynasty book. The series is an ambitious effort by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles to trace the history of England through the eyes of one fictional Yorkshire family. With The Devil’s Horse, I’m now halfway through the series as it stands now (although two more books are in the works).  Although I’ve enjoyed the [...]

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The Eliots of Damerosehay Trilogy

I was recently very ill with an extremely nasty bout of salmonella poisoning. This landed me in the hospital for three days, and when I’m sick and relatively helpless, I turn to comfort reading. I rarely have the time to re-read these days — it seems that there are so many new books begging for [...]

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Words for the Wind: the Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke

I have a habit of reading poetry before I go to bed at night. It takes me a long time to get through a collection of poetry, since I read poems slowly (and sometimes aloud) and generally only read one or two a night. I am generally a lover of modern poetry — a few [...]

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