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Buddy Reads – Lioness at Large

Buddy Reads

Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany Aching is growing up — finally! To be fair, it never felt like Pratchett was writing “down” to Tiffany or to a younger audience in the first three books of this subseries; for one thing, Pratchett was probably constitutionally incapable of writing down to anybody to begin with, and the fact that Tiffany (being […]

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Literature Reviews

Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap

Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot.  (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.)  So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]

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Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: Wintersmith

Blurb: Tiffany Aching put one foot wrong, made one little mistake … and now the spirit of winter is in love with her. He gives her roses and icebergs, says it with avalanches and showers her with snowflakes — which is tough when you’re 13, but also just a little bit … cool. And just […]

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Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: A Hat Full of Sky

Blurb: ‘WE SEE YOU. NOW WE ARE YOU . . .’ No real witch would casually step out of their body, leaving it empty. Tiffany Aching does. And there’s something just waiting for a handy body to take over. Something ancient and horrible, which can’t die. To deal with it, Tiffany has to go to […]

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Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: The Wee Free Men

Hogfather meets H.C. Andersen’s Snow Queen; also, Tiffany is to a certain extent a rewrite of Esk from Equal Rites. Hogfather says the same things as this book better and way more pithily, but this one is still amusing, and the Nac Mac Feegles are a hoot, of course. Surprisingly, I’m not disturbed by Tiffany’s […]

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Cats Literature

Halloween Bingo 2021: Card, Spells, Markers and Book Pool

Phew!  I’ve had blog display issues for the better part of August due to a stupid WP plugin acting up (and of course, it was a plugin allegedly intended to “facilitate” the import of content into my chosen theme — haha, right), but luckily they were resolved just in time for Halloween Bingo! (Gosh … […]

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Cats Literature

Halloween Bingo 2020: TA’s Game Preparation Post

Note When updating this post during the game, the books actually selected will be highlighted in bold print and with a check mark (√) next to them. Updates Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora — STONE COLD HORROR replaced by READ BY FLASHLIGHT OR CANDLELIGHT Also, as our game hosts have made it clear that […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

2020 Mid-Year Reading Review and Statistics

What with the pandemic still very much ongoing, BL acting up again, MR’s and Char’s resulting posts re: BookLikes, the BL experience, and moving back to Goodreads, this feels like a somewhat odd moment to post my half-yearly reading stats.  I hope it won’t be the last time on this site, but I fear that […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time & Dickon

This weekend’s “let’s-forget-the-pandemic” buddy read wasn’t the first time I read Josephine Tey’s setting-the-record-straight-about-Richard III novel, The Daughter of Time, but it was the first time that I did so by reading it together with her play on the same subject (written under the name Gordon Daviot), Dickon, and that combined reading changed my perspective […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Cyril Hare: Tenant for Death

Reading Progress Updates 41 of 206 Pages: Aaand we’re off to our next forget-the-pandemic weekend read!  A corpse has been discovered as a surplus-to-inventory item, and the arrival of Inspector Mallett is imminent. If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d never believe that this was Hare’s first published book — the writing is incredibly assured and […]

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BookLikes Imports Cats Linked Items Literature Reviews

Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice

Et in Arcadia ego. Scales of Justice is a book from the middle segment of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series and a superb example of the “serpent [even] in Paradise” type of Golden Age mysteries.  Marsh goes to great lengths to establish the book’s seemingly idyllic rural setting, beginning with its name, Swevenings (which we […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Patricia Wentworth: The Case Is Closed

Well, this was enjoyable.  As in some of Wentworth’s other books, the mystery wasn’t much to write home about  — the principal villains are known pretty much from the word “go”, as is the way the whole thing was worked (there’s one huge clue fairly early on which essentially gives the game away, and the false […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature

Discworld December Group Read: Guards! Guards!

  In all the Festive Tasks excitement, let’s all not forget that our December group read also starts today — and it’s a truly great one (IMHO one of the best books in the entire series): the first book of the Night Watch subseries, and though actually written almost exactly 30 years ago, Pratchett could […]

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BookLikes Imports Fun and Games Linked Items Literature

Terry Pratchett: Pyramids — Halloween Bingo 2019, Eighth Extra Square (Monsters) & Discworld October Group Read

  I haven’t decided for which bingo square I’ll be using this, but from the blurb and from what I’ve read so far, it will fit — at a minimum — the Supernatural, Creepy Crawlies, Deadlands, Monsters, Ghost Stories, Relics and Curiosities, Murder Most Foul, and Grave or Graveyard bingo squares; possibly / probably also […]

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BookLikes Imports Fun and Games Linked Items Literature

Discworld: October Group read starts TODAY

The Discworld Group’s October group read is the series’s first stand-alone novel, Pyramids. The blurb: “In Pyramids, you’ll discover the tale of Teppic, a student at the Assassin’s Guild of Ankh-Morpok and prince of the tiny kingdom of Djelibeybi, thrust into the role of pharaoh after his father’s sudden death. It’s bad enough being new […]

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BookLikes Imports Fun and Games Linked Items Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards!

This is a book that ought to be read today more than ever: The eighth Discworld novel and the first book of the Night Watch subseries — but first and foremost, an exploration of just how a political system can fail and slip into dictatorship right before everybody’s eyes. Whatever it was that motivated Pratchett […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters

Like a fine wine … … the kind of book that only gets better the more often you return to it. I’ve revisited Wyrd Sisters three times in the last two years alone, and every single time I’m savoring every single minute of the experience.  Definitely one of my favorite Discworld novels — next to […]

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BookLikes Imports Fun and Games Linked Items Literature

Discworld: Here is your bimonthly belated reminder …

… that the next group read is upon us and has (umm, theoretically) already started, on August 1, to be precise. (I swear I was going to post about this earlier this time around, but oh well …) The book is Wyrd Sisters, the second of the Witches subseries — and the first book in […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Jan Zalasiewicz & Mark Williams: Skeletons: The Frame of Life

Less Than What It Could Have Been OK, so I admit I didn’t check on the authors’ scholarly credentials before picking this up — if I had, I might not have been so disappointed to find that this is not, after all (not even in part) a book dealing with the way in which skeletons […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: Sourcery

Ooooh, I like this one. It’s got a “knife to a gun fight” reference (only involving porcupines) and a [literally] kick-ass heroine, takes digs at Aladdin and The Lord of the Rings — especially The Two Towers –, the Four Horsepersons of the Apothe…ca…thingamagig make an appearance, and the Librarian is taking a stand — […]

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