Cecil picked out a little flat box and opened it. Inside was a circle of wax. There was an impression on it but the wax, held together by a frame, was broken across. It looked like an animal with a stick between its hoofs. “What’s this? she asked. Ambrose Morne screwed in his eye-glass. “I […]
A friend asked for suggestions for beautiful books about the Middle Ages that don’t make it sound like a sad, terrible time for humanity with no ideas or beauty, only darkness. And I realized when I was trying to find suggestions on my blog that it’s time to update my book list. We’ve discovered some […]
Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff is a historical novel that takes place in the years after the British have lost a decisive battle to the Saxon at Aquae Sulis. The novel ends as Aethelbert consolidates his power as king of the Saxons in the south and the monk Augustine arrives as a missionary from Pope […]
A note to the reader: these novels are sadly out of print, but are available for cheap on Kindle. I have acquired some of them from used book sellers, but they are hard to find. Previously I compared the Warstowe Saga to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances. Now, Meriol Trevor doesn’t come across as the meticulous […]
When I was in college my best friend Stephanie introduced me to Georgette Heyer. I wasn’t at all interested in romance novels, but I was on holiday and like many intelligent readers I’ve since met, I let myself get swept away. I found Heyer’s historical romances sparkling and witty, sometimes a bit formulaic, but never […]
My friend Erin at Bearing Blog has a good post up, pondering a quote that my sister had posted on Facebook: Bearing Blog:Correction, and the damaged icon Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him. One does not help a person by […]
A few more thoughts on the novel, which I wrote a bit of first thoughts about yesterday. I’ve known women abused, traumatized (by priests, by husbands, by fathers) for whom religious things are a trigger, a door opening to the wide gulfs of anxiety, panic, horror. I know people for whom confession triggers massive anxiety. […]
I finished reading Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy last night. It’s a beautiful novel but I’m not sure what I have to say about it. This was my second read through and the thing that connected with me most unexpectedly this time was not the religious life and the protagonist’s mystical experiences– though I […]
I’ve just finished a re-read of The Dresden Files. I read the whole series at the same time of year in 2018, so I guess January is my Dresden binge season. Makes sense because I tend to get a touch of seasonal blues and binge reading favorite authors is one of my coping mechanisms. The […]
(I’m still, perhaps madly, hoping to maybe catch up on my reading notes for the last few months of 2019, but in the meantime, I put together this list for a friend and thought I’d share it here.) My favorite books that I read in the past year: 1. I re-read The Brothers Karamazov (Richard […]