Category: Books and Reading
What’s a clergyman to do when murder is committed in his home? Start investigating, that’s what, especially when Miss Marple lives next door. Leonard Clement is the vicar in St. Mary Mead, a small English village. He’s also the narrator of The Murder at the Vicarage, the first full length novel to feature Agatha’s Christie’s elderly sleuth Miss Jane Marple. When Colonel Protheroe is murdered in Clement’s study, the difficulty is not in finding a suspect, but in sorting through all the people who wanted him dead–including the vicar...
My favorite reading event from last year, Nonfiction November, is back! Nonfiction November was my very first online reading event, and it was a terrific experience. It helped reignite my excitement for blogging and it connected me with several terrific book bloggers. I can’t wait to see what new discoveries are in store this year. The topic for this first week is Your Year in Nonfiction, so here we go… Your Year in Nonfiction: Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following...
One of my favorite reading challenges this year has been the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge. Every Sunday I look forward to drawing a random card from the deck to see what story I’ll be reading this week. At this point in the year I only have nine cards left, which means I’ve read 43 stories. I’ve enjoyed this challenge so much that I’m already looking at anthologies to use for next year’s challenge. If you’ve been following along, you might remember that my theme is year...
If you love genealogy, mysteries, or stories set in contemporary London, then you will likely enjoy The Last Queen of England by Steve Robinson. Main character Jefferson Tayte is an American genealogist on a brief visit to London when he gets embroiled in an elaborate (and confusing) plot to topple the British monarchy. They key to the mystery lies in the genealogical records of the House of Stuart, but Tayte has to survive long enough to be able to solve it. This genealogical thriller is a quick and...
I had no idea when I began reading The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly that it was such a highly regarded mystery novel. I had heard of the movie starring Matthew McMcConaughey, so when the ebook went on sale for $2.99 I figured it was a pretty safe bet to be entertaining. It was all that and more. It’s no wonder that in 2006 it was awarded the Shamus Award and the Macavity Award for best mystery novel and, in 2010 was nominated for the Best Mystery Novel of...
One year ago I marked my 50th birthday by joining the Classics Club Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to read fifty classic novels in five years, and after one year I’m ahead of the pace by three books. In the last twelve months I’ve read the following thirteen books: The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1842) The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908) Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson (1908) The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) Conan –...
Lory over at Emerald City Book Review has a wonderfully thought-provoking post about the her relationship with the fantasy genre. I began to leave a comment there but it ended up growing too long for a simple comment, so I offer my thoughts here. Here is how Lory began: When I was growing up, I almost exclusively read fantasy. C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L’Engle, E. Nesbit were the writers I read again and again, devouring every one of their books....
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. I chose to read Romola for the 2017 Back to the Classics Challenge as my “Classic set in a place you’d like to visit.” The story takes place in Florence, Italy, which is one of my bucket-list destinations. Written by George Eliot in 1863, Romola transports the reader to Florence in 1492, where the main characters rub elbows with Niccolo Machiavelli, Girolamo Savonarola, members of the Medici family,...
I recently took a detour from my 2017 Reading Challenges to read The Man Who Was Poe by Avi. My daughter’s seventh grade class is reading it together and my wife and I wanted to share the experience with her. Plus, I find Poe a fascinating writer and I was looking forward to seeing him as a character in historical fiction. The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, when Edgar Allen Poe is reluctantly drawn into helping a young boy find his missing mother, sister, and...
The Man in the Brown Suit is a mystery novel, but it also reads like a grand adventure. There’s a murder to be solved for sure, but there’s also espionage, a perilous sea voyage, diamond smuggling, kidnapping, a journey across Africa, and romance. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much Agatha Christie was able to fit into the novel. And yet, it didn’t seemed forced or crammed in. Here’s how the publisher describes the book: Pretty, young Anne came to London looking for adventure. In fact, adventure comes...
Wow, somehow I missed doing any checkpoints for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, but at least I’ll get one in before the end of the year. TBR stands for “To Be Read,” and refers to the mountain of books that have been sitting on my shelves or in my Amazon cloud that I haven’t read yet. It’s the middle of October, and I’ve read 22 books on my way to Mount Vancouver, leaving me with 6 more books to go. Here are my finished books so far: The...
The last time I read Jane Austen’s Emma was long before I had seen the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow. Since then I’ve seen the movie maybe half a dozen times, as it’s become one of my girls’ favorites. Because I’ve seen it so many times, the movie has overshadowed the book in my memory. So as I picked up my Kindle to read the novel for my Classics Club Challenge I was curious about how different the two might be and how the movie would stand up next to the...
