I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]
A treasure chest for those who like conspiracy theories
Seventeenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. What could one want from a historical yet fictional novel? That it be accurate when it is talking of history and that it be filled with spectacular fictional tales. In Foucalt’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco delivers on both counts. This is a book that is full of historical facts and some amazing conspiracy theories. There are so many of them, that every other line has a reference to some obscure cult or secret organization with events that […]
So British, you can’t open the book unless the kettle is on
The Dark is Rising sequence is the story of four children, the three Drew children – Barney, Jane, & Simon, and Will Stanton. Will is important because he is an Old One, a member of a race of beings who have magical powers and can move through time. The Drew children are important precisely because they are not magical beings. They are ordinary human children. The sequence is five books long: Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver […]
The Curious Incident of the Brilliant Book
So it turns out that I have a soft spot for the unconventional amateur sleuth. Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Flavia de Luce, Agatha Raisin, the list goes on. It’s a miracle I haven’t read the Shardlake series, really. One amateur sleuth to which Bauer and her excellent novel owe something of a debt is Christopher Boone. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s groundbreaking Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was never noted as specifically having Asperger’s and was investigating who killed his neighbour’s dog, which […]
Midsomer Marple Gets Wet
So here we are. After the mind numbing banality and apparently endless pages of The Kills, I needed something to decompress. Something easy, something short, something that I can take my brain out for and still enjoy. Who better fulfils that remit that Miss Marple by way of Midsomer Murders? As some of you may be aware, I’ve read a fair few of these books and this instalment is number 12 in the still ongoing series. Not bad when you consider the author is knocking on 80 years old. When we […]
A Long Time Ago… Oh, You Know the Rest
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a fan of the Veronica Mars tv show (and most likely the movie as well), so I’m not going to reintroduce all the characters or delve into any history here. This novel picks up right after the events of the movie, with Veronica leaving her life in NY behind to take her rightful place behind the desk at Mars Investigations while Keith recovers from his injuries. Just as she’s pondering how she’ll pay her new assistant, Mac, a […]
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