Mostly I’m continuing to read Brothers Karamazov and Can You Forgive Her. The Brothers Karamazov I first read in Lent of 2011. Anthony had just been born and I finished the whole book that Lent, as I recall. And that’s about all I recall (and I needed help from my blog post at the […]
“Odysseus was melting into tears; his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing upon his corpse. The men are right behind. […]
Reading Notes January 2019 I joined two online reading groups and started reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Ambitious? Yes. Foolishly so? Perhaps. Only time will tell. I abandoned The Bear and the Nightingale. I didn’t like where the story was going. I had no assurance I’d like where it ended […]
But even in today’s versatile use of the word craft there is only the faintest overlap with the definition craeft had when it first appeared in written English over a thousand years ago. The Oxford English Dictionary can find no one word to exchange like for like, for Old English craeft, and instead offers an […]
Faith in Ready Player One? Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a fun romp through 80s nostalgia and a quest story for lovers of video games, pop music and movies. I’ve read it twice and seen the movie version too— I liked the book better than the movie. It’s not what I’d call a […]
The Lost Words: A Spell Book by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. The premise of this book is intriguing. Someone noticed that 40 nature words– like fern and heather and kingfisher–were dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of tech words like blog and voicemail. And so a book was born, a book […]
I finished 44 books this year and I started or made some progress on many more that I never finished. That’s not counting any of the books I read aloud to the kids, though I certainly thought about them and they do form a large part of my reading life these days. But I put […]
During my current re-read of Gaudy Night I started to think about the mystery genre in general and myself as a reader of mysteries in particular. I’ve read a lot of mystery novels in my life. I like the genre. Or at least I like a lot of mystery novelists: I’ve read Dorothy Sayers and […]
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers My friend Nicole, who had never read any Sayers and to whom I had recommended Gaudy Night, noticed that the Kindle version was on sale for just $1.99. So I snapped it up and then having it right there and having a friend who started sharing quotes on Facebook was […]
Finished in November 1. By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson Set a generation after The King’s Achievement, during the later part of Elizabeth’s reign. There are minor characters who were in the previous work and it’s interesting to see them from that perspective. I read this book some years ago, but had not previously […]