The Halloween Creatures Book Tag
Rules: Answer all prompts. Answer honestly. Tag 1-13 people. Link back to this post. ( For me it was SnoopyDoo!) Remember to credit the creator. (Anthony @ Keep Reading Forward)< Have fun! Witch A Magical Character or Book Terry Pratchett’s witches, particularly Granny Weatherwax. And DEATH (preferably in his Hogfather incarnation). No contest. […]
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Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other
Not a proper review, just a short note to say … Heaven knows the Booker jury doesn’t always get it right IMHO, but wow, this time for once they absolutely did. If you haven’t already read this, run, don’t walk to get it. And though initially I was going to say “especially if you’re a […]
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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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Dorothy L. Sayers: Love All (aka Cat’s Cradle)
Sayers Does Drawing Room Comedy When I bought the joint edition of Busman’s Honeymoon and Love All (published in 1980), the obvious pièce de résistance, for me, and the reason why I spent some time hunting down an affordable copy at all, was the stage version of Busman’s Honeymoon – the final full-length outing of […]
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Gaël Faye: Petit pays (Small Country)
A short but impactful novel (barely longer than a novella), tracing the coming-of-age of the son of a French father and a Burundian Tutsi mother, which coming-of-age is rudely interrupted when the genocide in neighboring Rwanda spills over into Burundi. Along the way, the novel examines how our cultural identity is first drummed into us, […]
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Sonia Sotomayor: My Beloved World
What a courageous woman! Justice Sotomayor’s memoirs of her upbringing in the New York Puerto Rican community, and her unlikely, but doggedly pursued path to Princeton, Yale Law School, and ultimately, the Federal Bench — fulfilling a dream that had, oddly, started by watching Perry Mason on TV as a child. Sotomayor is a trailblazer […]
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John Bercow: Unspeakable
An impromptu buddy read with BrokenTune; delivered in Bercow’s trademark style and doubtlessly offering as much fodder to those determined to hate him as to those who regret his stepping down as Speaker: I, on the other hand, found myself glued to my phone — this is a riveting narrative (even the bits about his […]
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Hyeonseo Lee: The Girl with Seven Names
A riveting read and proof positive of the old adage that truth is vastly stranger than fiction: the true story of a young woman who defected from North Korea to China “by accident” right before her 18th birthday and, after ten years of trials and tribulations, eventually ended up in South Korea and, later, in […]
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Michelle Obama: Becoming
Mrs. Obama may have chosen to focus on her charity work and on political education instead of seeking a career in party politics after she and her husband had left the White House (and who could possibly blame her?), but I am very glad she also decided to give us her deeply personal perspective on […]
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Kofi Annan: Interventions: A Life in War and Peace
Mr. Annan was far and away the most influential and important Secretary General of the United Nations in its more recent history; his memoirs set forth with great passion and understanding how the experience of a lifetime, from growing up in post-WWII Ghana all the way to serving as Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping under Boutros Boutros-Ghali, […]
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2019: The Books I’ve Been Most Thankful For
24 Festive Tasks: Door 11 – Thanksgiving: Task 2 With another full month to go in the year, it may be a bit early to do this task, but a substantial number of the books I’m going to be reading in December will be Christmas rereads, so here we go. The books / authors I […]
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Arthur Conan Doyle: Danger
What a timely read: Much more than “merely” the author of the Sherlock Holmes books, Conan Doyle was an astute observer of the politics of his time, and he did not shy away from speaking his mind, even if that meant offending the highest in the land. Danger is a short story that he wrote […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Tracking Post — Blackout! (And bingos Nos. 12 and 13.)
Many thanks to Moonlight Reader and Obsidian Blue for hosting this game for the fourth year in a row, bigger and better than ever before! Witih today’s call, I’ve blacked out my card, in addition to collecting my final bingos (nos. 12 and 13). Somewhat to my surprise, after completing my books for my […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Fourteenth Extra Square – Grave or Graveyard
Original post: ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1969119/halloween-bingo-2019-fourteenth-extra-square
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Third Extra Square – New Release
Original post: ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1962160/halloween-bingo-2019-third-extra-square
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Halloween Bingo 2019: The Fourth Week
Reading blackout before the end of the first bingo month and two more completed bingos in week 4 for a total of three bingos so far — if anybody had told me this going in, I’d have questioned their sanity. Not least because I had a major project to complete this month, which I knew […]
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Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale & The Testaments
~ Gilead ~ Well, that was as soul-drenching as any double bill ever was (even though The Testaments is marginally more optimistic than The Handmaid’s Tale). It’s not always a good idea for an author to revisit one of their standout classics decades later, but in this instance it clearly worked. Atwood stays faithful to […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Tracking Post — Bingo No. 3 and Reading Blackout
* Triple Bingo Happy Dance * Well, that went by much faster than I had anticipated … Many thanks to Moonlight Reader and Obsidian Blue for hosting this game for the fourth year in a row, bigger and better than ever before! I’ll continue tracking my bingos of course — and since we now have […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Final Square
For my final bingo square — “International Woman of Mystery” — I’ve decided on a Margaret Atwood double bill: a reread of The Handmaid’s Tale followed by its recent sequel, The Testaments … if I can stand that extended exposure to Gilead, that is, and don’t end up bailing out of The Handmaid’s Tale halfway […]
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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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