The Summer Tree

It all starts with a lecture at the Second International Celtic Conference at the University of Toronto at which the reclusive Lorenzo Marcus is making his first-ever public appearance. By the end of the evening, Marcus is revealed to be a powerful mage, and five students at the university have become embroiled in a world [...]

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Sunday Salon: Reading Assumptions

I am a book voyeur. When I’m out and about and notice someone reading a book, I’ll crane my neck and try to see what the book is. I’m not bold enough to start a conversation about it, but I love to see what people are reading. Part of it is just liking to know [...]

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Fables 12: The Dark Ages

Last year, I read the first 11 volumes of the marvelous Fables comic book series in which characters from many of our beloved fairy tales and other stories are living in a section of New York City called Fabletown. They’ve lived there, and in other outposts in our world, for hundreds of years having been [...]

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Billy Bathgate

Occasionally, I have a book on my TBR list that just keeps getting pushed to the bottom, for no good reason. Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow, has been on my list for about ten years. I think I started listening to it on audiobook all that time ago, and the copy was unlistenably bad, so [...]

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The Hidden Shore (Morland Dynasty #19)

It’s hard to believe I’m now well over halfway through Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Moland Dynasty series, which explores the history of England (and more) through the lives of one Yorkshire family. Although I’ve enjoyed the whole series, it wasn’t until the eighth book or so that I started to really delight in the Morland story. The [...]

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Sunday Salon: What Makes Fiction Literary?

Before I started blogging, I rarely heard and never even used the term literary fiction. Fiction in my mind could be categorized into genres (science fiction, romance, mysteries, etc.), classic literature, and everything else. Some books might appear in more than one genre (mystery/romance), and some classics might also belong in a genre. But other [...]

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The Glass Castle (audio)

When Jeannette Walls was 3 years old, she was hospitalized and given skin grafts after burning herself making hot dogs while her mother was happily painting in another room. Not long after her parents took her out of the hospital, she was home and hungry and got right back on the chair by the stove [...]

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The Language of Bees/The God of the Hive

Thanks to Jenny’s recommendation, I’ve been following Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series since before the release of the 4th book. I find that it’s rare for an author to keep a series consistent for multiple books, so with the release of each new addition to the series, I’ve worried that this [...]

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Two Lives

I’ve read two of Vikram Seth’s novels. The first was A Suitable Boy, which is 1500 pages of marvelous, chaotic, vibrant, sprawling postcolonial Indian epic. The second, which I find fewer people have read, I loved even more: An Equal Music, which tells the story of a love affair between two musicians, and also between a [...]

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Like Hidden Fire

I’ve read several of Peter Hopkirk’s marvelous histories, and reviewed two of them on this blog: The Great Game tells the real-life story of Kipling’s Kim and the battle between Britain and Russia for the wealth of India; Foreign Devils on the Silk Road opens the mysteries of the ancient civilization that lies buried under [...]

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