Category: Books and Reading

Deal Me In Short Story Challenge Queen of Hearts

Books and Reading

Deal Me In Story #2: Angelfish by Lester Dent

Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, The Continental Op, these are the hardboiled detectives. Tough and no-nonsense, they fought crime in the pages of pulp magazines like Black Mask, Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly. Some of their stories are collected in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart, where this week’s Deal Me In story comes from. Card Drawn: Q♥ Anthology: The Hardboiled Dicks edited by Ron Goulart Story: “Angelfish” by Lester Dent, 1936 When I was choosing and organizing my short stories for this year’s Deal Me In Challenge, I was excited...

The Bishop of Digne in his garden

Books and Reading / Chapter-a-Day Read-Along

Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-along: The Bishop

Welcome to week two of the Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-along. We’re now seven chapters into the book, and the story so far has been dominated by one man: the Bishop of Digne. Dominated is probably too strong a word for someone with his humility and charity, but he certainly makes an impression, and for all the right reasons. To my mind, the Bishop of Digne is one of the most memorable saintly characters in all of literature. But he almost wasn’t. Get Rid of That Bishop In the mid 1800’s,...

The Bishop of Digne

Books and Reading / Chapter-a-Day Read-Along / Twitter

#LesMisReadalong on Twitter: Week 1

We’ve almost finished the first week of the Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-along, and the Twitter conversation about the opening few chapters has been amazing. Readers are using the hashtag #LesMisReadalong to chronicle their reading experience, share their knowledge, and support each other in their literary journey. But if you don’t have a Twitter account, not to worry. This post is a sampling of some of the tweets from this past week that caught my attention. And I’ll have a new read-along post on Monday that will feature that humble,...

Deal Me In Challenge 2018 October Country

Books and Reading

Deal Me In Story #1: The Man Upstairs by Ray Bradbury

I’m excited to start a new year of reading short stories for the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge. Last year’s challenge was very successful except for one thing: I only reviewed a few of the short stories I read. This year I’m going to try and write about all of them, even if only briefly. That way I’ll remember them better when it comes time to review the anthologies they’re in. I always read my stories on Sundays, but I’m anxious to get started so I began...

Battle of Waterloo

Books and Reading / Chapter-a-Day Read-Along

Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-along: Structure and History

Welcome to 2018 and the beginning of the Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-along. By the time you read this you may already have read your first chapter, especially if you are one of our friends in Australia! It’s exciting to have so many of you on board and to know there are readers from all over the world participating. In this first of what I hope to be weekly posts, I’m going to discuss the structure of the novel and briefly mention a bit of French history. Feel free...

My Year in Books

Books and Reading

My Favorite Reads of 2017 Plus My Favorite Reads of the Last Decade

2017 was a wonderful year in reading for me. Not only was it my most productive reading year ever, but it was also my first year participating in reading challenges. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. This is also the tenth year in a row that I’ll be posting my favorite reads of the year. To mark the occasion I’m going to end this post with my favorite reads of the last decade. But first, a few statistics about my reading in 2017, courtesy of Goodreads: I read...

Books and Reading

Mount TBR 2017 Reading Challenge Wrap-up

Alan Vernon [CC BY] One of the most successful reading challenges I completed in 2017 was the Mount TBR challenge from Bev at My Reader’s Block. I have way too many books that I’ve purchased over the years sitting unread on my bookshelf or in the Kindle cloud. So I’m very happy that I was able to read 36 books from my TBR pile, climbing Mount Vancouver. Some books I acquired mere months before the challenge started, while others had been languishing on my shelves for decades. The...

Book Review / Books and Reading / Spirituality

A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr

“Remember, always remember, that the heartfelt desire to do the will of God is, in fact, the truest will of God. At that point God has won, the ego has lost, and your prayer has already been answered.” My constant companion each morning this past year was A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr. Like water dripping onto a stalagmite, this book slowly dripped onto my soul, building it up each day. Rohr writes with great spiritual maturity, and his words always challenge...

The Apothecary Rose by Candace Robb

Book Review / Books and Reading

The Apothecary Rose by Candace Robb

The Apothecary Rose by Candace Robb is a historical murder mystery set in England in 1363. The book opens with two suspicious deaths in the infirmary at St. Mary’s Abbey. The Lord Chancellor of England then sends his former captain of archers, Owen, to try and find out what happened. The mystery centers on an apothecary shop run by Master Nicholas Wilton and his wife/apprentice Lucie. Owen has orders to go under cover and insinuate himself into the lives of the people of York in order to discover why and...

British Book Challenge

Books and Reading

British Books Challenge 2017 Wrap-up

I’ve always been fond of classic British authors, so the British Books Challenge (hosted by Chelley at Tales of Yesterday) fit right into my reading plan for 2017. I read thirteen books for this challenge, only two of which I had read before, Emma and Nineteen Eighty-four. My favorite was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and my least favorite was Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson. Genres included epic poetry, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and satire. The most recent book was Agatha Christie’s 4:50 from Paddington from 1957, and the earliest book was Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year...

The Ultimate Gift by Jim Stovall

Book Review / Books and Reading

The Ultimate Gift by Jim Stovall

The Ultimate Gift by Jim Stovall is a contrived, preachy story where most of the action takes place off stage. Despite all of that it’s still worth reading. The plot revolves around Jason Stevens, a spoiled young man who stands to inherit a life-changing amount of money if he fulfills certain tasks set out in the will of his rich great-uncle Red Stevens. Red is an old-school Texas oil-man who upon his death leaves behind twelve video messages to teach Jason the important life lessons that he failed...

The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton

Book Review / Books and Reading

The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton

“When our last bow is broken, Queen, And our last javelin cast, Under some sad, green evening sky, Holding a ruined cross on high, Under warm westland grass to lie, Shall we come home at last?” Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse is wonderful epic poetry, but I found myself rushing through it. Part of the reason was my lack of knowledge about English history, and part of it was that I just wasn’t in the mood for poetry. But I think anyone who loves Dante, Homer, or...