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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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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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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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: 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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Sofi Oksanen: Fegefeuer (The Purge)
Based on everything I’d previously heard about this book, it took me quite a while to get up my nerve to read it, because I knew I’d be in for a fairly merciless game of psychological hares and foxes — which however, of course, meant that it would be a natural choice for the “Psych” […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: The Third Week
Well, the third week really hit my bingo experience out of the ballpark this year — and not only Pbecause it finished with my first completed bingo; that was actually just the icing on the cake. But it included no less than three absolutely knock-out fabulous books, plus a fourth that was almost as good […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019 PreParty — Question for 08/09 (Day 9): Book Suggestions for the New Squares? Part 1: “Paint It Black”
Today’s prompt is for favorite horror reads; that not being much of my thing (outside, perhaps, the gothic classics and anything more edifying or funny rather than scary), I think I’m going to leave that prompt to Char, Bark’s Books (aka Bark at the Ghouls), and the site’s other horror fans. Instead, I’m going to […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019 PreParty — Question for 08/02 (Day 2): Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies or Other?
Witches. One of my very first literary heroine was a little witch who manages to get the better of all the bigger, older witches after having been put down by them — the heroine of Otfried Preußler’s Little Witch. (In fact, I loved that book enough to write my very first fan letter to the […]
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Clea Koff: The Bone Woman
War Crimes Laid Bare from Beyond the Grave Some 15+ years ago, towards the end of the years when I was practicing law in the U.S., I was asked to represent a young woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, the former Zaire) in an immigration case. My client was a Tutsi, in her […]
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Clea Koff: The Bone Woman — Part 5: Kosovo
Reading progress update: 256 of 277 pages. The airport of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is called Kosovo Polje — roughly translated, “blackbird field” (“kos” is blackbird in Serbo-Croat). Kosovo Polje is also the name of the battle (and battlefield) which, in 1389, opened the door for the Ottoman conquest of large chunks of the […]
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Clea Koff: The Bone Woman — Part 4: Croatia
Reading progress update: 194 of 277 pages. Vukovar and Eastern Slavonia: a notorious bone of contention between Croats and Serbs, and a necessary reminder that: 1) The Serbs weren’t the only ones to commit war crimes, drive out their neighbours or profit from ethnic cleansing. All sides to the conflict had blood on their hands. […]
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