Robert Louis Stevenson
Six Favorite Scottish Writers
24 Festive Tasks: Door 12 – St. Andrew’s Day, Task 1: Tell us: Who is your favorite Scottish (or Scots-born / -descendant) writer? Six favorite Scottish writers: Arthur Conan Doyle: Elementary. Robert Louis Stevenson: For Kidnapped alone — though his Edinburgh Picturesque Notes, even 150 years after their first publication, remain one of the […]
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My Favorite Children’s Books
24 Festive Tasks: Door 8 – International Children’s Day, Task 1: What was your favorite children’s book growing up? Your favorite middle grade book? The first books I really loved, even before I had learned to read myself, were a number of recorded fairy tales that I owned (in actual record format) — a little […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019 PreParty — Question for 08/01 (Day 1): Mystery or Horror?
Mystery, definitely. For one thing, I’m a total chicken — I can’t look at blood (not even, or rather, especially not my own, e.g. in medical procedures); and anything shocking, spooky, or otherwise unnaturally unsettling just has me running for the rafters. That’s particularly true at night — which is when I’m doing a […]
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My Historical Fiction Essentials
Finally getting around to this — as per Chris’s invitation, here’s my list (in no particular order, and with major reliance on Chris’s dictum that it’s “fine to list a whole author’s work or series and have it count as one entry”): Hillary Mantel’s historical fiction I’ve yet to try her contemporary writing, but both […]
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Crowdsourced: More Books with a Difference – Fiction
You asked, Moonlight Reader? To quote from one of my additional entries below: “As you wish …” Without any further ado: Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies When Lillelara added A Place of Greater Safety to her list, I could have kicked myself — because Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books were definitely among […]
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Book Rescue, Book-Related Places of Pilgrimage … and My Personal Literary Canon, Part 1
24 Festive Tasks: Door 7 – Mawlid, Task 2: The Five Pillars of Islam almsgiving and the pilgrimage to Mekka. Tell us: Have you ever donated books or rescued them from (horror of horrors) being trashed? Alternatively: Is there a book-related place that is a place of pilgrimage to you? If I donate books, I […]
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Halloween Bingo 2017: Update 3, Part 2 — Catching up on Reviews
The “bingo” squares and books read: My Square Markers and “Virgin” Bingo Card: “Virgin” card posted for ease of tracking and comparison. Black Kitty: Read but not called Black Vignette: Called but not read Black Kitty in Black Vignette: Read and Called Black Kitty Center Square: Read = Called Current Status […]
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Various Authors: Murder Most Foul
This is a collection of eight short stories by different authors, read with great aplomb by five well-known British actors. It starts of with Bluebeard’s Bath by Margery Allingham — read by Patrick Malahide –, a “non-Campion” twist on the black widow trope (the twist being, as the title implies, that here it’s a black […]
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Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
One of the great classics of the horror genre — which I’d read before, but when I heard that there was a recording of the story by Sir Christopher Lee, I just had to have it. And Lee more than delivers on the promise associated with his name alone. No wide-eyed, flamboyantly-gestured horror movie antics […]
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Halloween Bingo 2017: Update 2
My Square Markers and “Virgin” Bingo Card: “Virgin” card posted for ease of tracking and comparison, as called and read squares will, bit by bit, vanish behind my markers and everybody’s cards are different. Black Kitty: Read but not called Black Vignette: Called but not read Black Kitty in Black Vignette: Read and Called […]
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