The Arabian Nights: A Companion

While I was on my recent trip to France, I read The Arabian Nights. I also decided to take along Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: A Companion, thinking that a little literary criticism of a classic never hurts. I was expecting an exegesis of each story, or of groups of stories — classic textual criticism, [...]

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The Two Towers: LOTR Book 4

Welcome to the end of March and the end of our The Two Towers leg of the Lord of the Rings Readalong. To follow the discussion of The Two Towers from the beginning, check out my Intro and Book 3 posts. As in the past posts, I’ll offer a few questions to spark discussion. If [...]

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Ptolemy’s Gate (audio)

After saving Nathaniel’s hide on multiple occasions, Bartimaeus the djinni is fed up. Nathaniel, his magician master, has kept him hard at work plastering propaganda posters on walls and taking care of other duties required by Nathaniel’s new role as information officer for the magical government of England. And Bartimaeus has had to do all [...]

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A Civil Contract

Most historical romances end in a wedding or a proposal of marriage, but Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract begins with the proposal. Adam Deveril has recently inherited his family’s estate, but Adam’s father, Lord Lynton, had frittered away the fortune required to maintain the estate, and Adam faces the difficult possibility of having to sell [...]

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The Poison Tree (Morland Dynasty #17)

This month’s installment in my read-through of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Morland Dynasty series seemed particularly relevant this past week, as the news stories here in the U.S. were dominated by legislation for health care reform. As I listened to news reports about the legislative wrangling involved, I was reading in The Poison Tree about similar wrangling [...]

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Sunday Salon: Announcements, Announcements, Announcements

Just a couple of quick notes about upcoming events this week: Classics Circuit. Jenny and I have been loyal participants in the Classics Circuit from the beginning. It’s sort of turned into a two-person, long-distance book club for us. I’m especially excited about the tour coming up in May/June on the Golden Age of Detective [...]

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The Arabian Nights

What do the Arabian Nights conjure up for you? Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Roc’s egg? Would you be surprised to find out that none of those stories are in the original Arabian Nights, which numbered not a thousand and one nights of Shahrazad’s stories, but about 350? In [...]

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The Night of the Iguana

When I wrote last month about my love of theatre and the fact that I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading plays, relying instead on seeing them, Frances encouraged me to join in on a shared read of The Night of the Iguana. I wasn’t sure I wanted to join in because now that [...]

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Speak

It’s Melinda’s first day of ninth grade, and she’s alone. Her friends from previous school years have all abandoned her and disbursed into their own cliques. People whisper about her behind her back (and sometimes right in front of her) because she’s the one who called the cops on the night of the big party [...]

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The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

There’s no shame in admitting you play guitar in your spare time, or that you are an amateur photographer, or an avid baker, or a dabbler in watercolors. But there’s something a little odd in saying you write poetry for fun, says Stephen Fry: An adolescent girl may write poetry, so long as it is [...]

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