Tagged: fantasy fiction

Father Elijah by Michael D. O'Brien

Book Review / Books and Reading

Reflecting on Father Elijah

I have just finished Michael D. O’Brien’s Father Elijah for the second time. I hadn’t read it in about five years, and I wanted to re-read it before Tom Curran discussed it later this month on his Sound Insights radio show. I remember liking it a lot more the first time I read it, probably because it was such a revelation to me. The book attempts to look at the second coming from a Catholic perspective. If you’ve read or heard about the Left Behind series, and wondered...

Book Review / Books and Reading / General

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

There’s nothing in the living world like books on water cures, deaths-of-a-thousand-slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle walls on drolls and mountebanks. How I just love Ray Bradbury’s writing style. After I read any of his stories or novels, the world becomes a more interesting place. Falling leaves become tears that the trees cry; rain is the cleansing power of the universe; books are portals to new worlds. Ray Bradbury takes the ordinary world and electrifies it until it shimmers with a glow that was always waiting...

The Sword of Shannara

Book Review / Books and Reading

The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight. There was a time–about five years ago–when only a few of my students had heard of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Of course, all that has changed with Peter Jackson’s magnificent movies. Now all of my students are familiar with the story, and many of them have read the books. If you haven’t read them yet, buy them immediately–they’re that good (and so much more satisfying than the movies, which I also happen to love). But...