REBLOG: Starting November 1, 2016
Reblogged from: Moonlight Murder Don’t forget that we are beginning the Mary Stewart Merlin readalong on November 1st! Start acquiring your books now so you are ready to read! Original post: ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1484003/starting-november-1-2016
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MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
A Dainty Dish Ever since his Oscar-nominated Henry V adaptation, Kenneth Branagh has come up with a simple, effective recipe: Blend 3 parts English actors well-versed in all things “Bard” with 1 or 2 parts Hollywood, sprinkle the mixture liberally over one of Shakespeare‘s plays, lift the material out of its original temporal and local […]
Read MoreThe countdown has started! — Pencils and What-Not [REBLOG]
Just six days to go till publication day!Here’s a Goodreads review:Excerpt: The Sugar Planter’s Daughter by Sharon Maas is a deep and heartrending story of love and loss; betrayal and forgiveness; secrets and lies. I felt deeply involved in Winnie’s and George’s lives; the lives of George’s family and their encompassment of Winnie into their […]
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Samantha Wilcoxson: Plantagenet Princess, Tudor Queen / Faithful Traitor
Of Loyalty, Roses and Broom Shrubs, or: A Surfeit of Royal Blood And here I prophesy: this brawl to-day, Grown to this faction in the Temple-garden, Shall send between the red rose and the white A thousand souls to death and deadly night. William Shakespeare: King […]
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IMPROMPTU
“You must win him as a man wins a woman.” Poor Mallefille – you really have to pity him. Not only has he become the lover of the woman who employed him to tutor her children (and whose reputation is hard to take for his pathologically jealous nature anyway); only to be dumped again in […]
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THE ENGLISH PATIENT
Ownership, Belonging, and an Earth Without Maps After the publication of Michael Ondaatje‘s Booker-Prize-winning English Patient, conventional wisdom soon held that the novel, while a masterpiece of fiction, was entirely untransferable to any other medium: too intricately layered seemed its narrative structure; too significant its protagonists’ inner life; too rich its symbolism. Then along came […]
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HOWARDS END
Homecomings Most of us connect the notion of “home” or “childhood home” with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox’s world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend […]
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SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
“Is Love a Fancy or a Feeling?” When Emma Thompson was approached with the suggestion to write a screenplay based on Jane Austen‘s first novel Sense and Sensibility (1811), she was somewhat doubtful because, as she explains on the DVD’s commentary track, she felt that other Austen works, like the more expressive Emma and Persuasion […]
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THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
Love, Loneliness and the Strictures of Society. Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world “balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper” (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history – read: scandal –; where everything is labeled and […]
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CASABLANCA
You must remember this … Aaaahhh … Bogey. AFI’s No. 1 film star of the 20th century. Hollywood’s original noir anti-hero, epitome of the handsome, cynical and oh-so lonesome wolf (with “Casablanca”‘s Rick Blaine alone, one of the Top 5 guys on the AFI’s list of greatest 20th century film heroes); looking unbeatably cool in […]
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William Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage … Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassage, To witness duty, not to show my wit. (Sonnet No. 26) How to do justice to the legacy of literary history’s greatest mind – moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe’s […]
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Emma Thompson: The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries – Bringing Jane Austen’s Novel to Film
“Is Love a Fancy or a Feeling?” When Emma Thompson was approached with the suggestion to write a screenplay based on Jane Austen‘s first novel Sense and Sensibility (1811), she was somewhat doubtful because, as she explains on the DVD’s commentary track, she felt that other Austen works, like the more expressive Emma and Persuasion […]
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Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Love, Loneliness, and the Strictures of Society Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world “balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper” (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history – read: scandal –; where everything is labeled and […]
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Wallace Stegner: Remembering Laughter
Early hallmarks of Stegner’s greatest works. On the front porch of their Iowa farm house, Margaret Stuart and her sister Elspeth watch the arrival of the funeral guests of Margaret’s husband Alec. Having aged rapidly and before their time, they seem to be twins; although in fact there is a seven year age difference between […]
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Sharon Maas: The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q.
Coming Home When Sharon Maas first made it known to her then-agent and then-editor that she was thinking about writing a book set in her native Guyana, she met with blank incomprehension and utter rejection: “Guyana? Whyever would anyone write about that little backwater country; a place nobody knows anything about and which probably at […]
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Sharon Maas: Of Marriageable Age
Love and cultural heritage, and perfumes from India. An orphan boy adopted by an English doctor, living near Madras, in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu: Nataraj. A headstrong teenager, daughter of an Indian lawyer in Georgetown, British Guiana: Sarojini. Back in Madras, earlier, a cook’s daughter, of Brahmin descent but a servant girl […]
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Astrid Lindgren: Pippi Longstocking / Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Well, one day I may well get around to writing proper reviews of Lindgren’s and Tolstoy’s books after all, too. But until then, quite unapologetically, my Goodreads Celebrity Death Match Review Elimination Tournament entry will have to do … Girl Power, or: Celebrity Death Match Review Elimination Tournament Review: Anna Karenina (12) vs. Pippi Långstrump […]
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E.M. Forster: Howards End
Homecomings Most of us connect the notion of “home” or “childhood home” with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox’s world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend […]
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Dermot Bolger, Maeve Binchy, Emma Donoghue, Clare Boylan, et al.: Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel
Chick Lit, or a Victim of Sequelitis? An old adage says that some good things are better left alone – and I’ve certainly found this to be true here, because although this “Finbar” sequel was devised and edited by Dermot Bolger, who also oversaw the original project, I cared decidedly less for this book than […]
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Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Thus Mansfield Park‘s improbable heroine, Fanny Price, admonishes her would-be suitor Henry Crawford when he purports to ask for her advice in a bid to win her around, after having already seduced her much wealthier […]
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