King Hereafter (reread)

When I think of the great historical fiction novelists, the first name to come to my mind is Dorothy Dunnett. Jenny first introduced me to Dunnett more than 10 years ago, when she urged me to read the Lymond Chronicles, Dunnett’s marvelous 6-volume series about the fictional 16-century Scottish nobleman Francis Crawford of Lymond. Within [...]

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God’s Bits of Wood

In the 1940s, Ousmane Sembene was part of a transportation workers’ strike in Senegal. In 1960, he used some of those experiences to create the novel Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood), a vivid, strong novel that shows both the power of French colonialism and the power of the people working [...]

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Seven Suspects

I first read about Michael Innes at Elaine’s blog over on Random Jottings. (This is now true of so many good books I’ve read that I feel I should have a special symbol, like ^ or #, to indicate that Elaine turned me on to an author.) Since I’m a fan of Golden Age detective [...]

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Résistance: A Frenchwoman’s Journal of the War (audio)

When World War II began, Agnès Humbert was an art historian at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris. The war, however, turned her into an underground journalist for the French Resistance. This work, in turn, led to her imprisonment by the Nazis and years of slave labor at a rayon factory [...]

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Family Happiness (re-read)

I’m literally months behind on reviews, and some books I read in the past few months I’ll probably just allow to pass unremembered, but I can’t let 2010 go by without remarking on my re-read of one of my favorite novels in the world, Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness. Re-reads of beloved novels can be dicey, [...]

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Sunday Salon: 2010 in Review

It’s the last Sunday in 2010, so it seems like a perfect time to look back over the year. This, of course, means a best of list. I find it impossible to choose a set number of books that are the “best,” so I’m continuing the tradition Jenny and I started last year of putting [...]

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Photo by Shawn Calhoun (via Flickr Creative Commons) Whatever you celebrate, and how ever you celebrate, here’s hoping you have a wonderful holiday season!

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The Dark Half

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, before I started actually reading Stephen King, I was under the impression that he was a pretty messed up guy. Wouldn’t he have to be to write the kinds of books he writes? In The Dark Half, King explores that very question and comes to some unsettling conclusions. [...]

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The Year Behind, the Year Ahead

The past couple of months have seen me mostly absent from Shelf Love, and indeed  – almost for the first time in my entire life — from reading. There’s been illness in my house, and it’s also been an exceptionally difficult semester at work, and so I’ve taken an unscheduled and unwanted break from the [...]

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The Belgariad, Part I (Pawn of Prophesy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician’s Gambit)

When I was 14 years old, I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time, and a love affair with high fantasy was born. At least, that’s what I like to think. In reality, as I look back on my reading over the years, there’s very little high fantasy among my favorites. There [...]

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