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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Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare
Hmmm. After having read and liked — though not loved — Harkup’s book on Agatha Christie’s use of poisons in her mysteries (A Is for Arsenic), it took the Shakespeare fan in me about a millisecond to snatch up this third book of hers when I came across it earlier this year … only to […]
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Halloween Bingo 2020: The Second Week (+1 Day)
Posting this on Monday instead of Sunday again … oh well. I guess after a near-phenomenal first bingo week it was only to be expected that the second week would not be quite as fabulous. Mind you, I’m not complaining — my card is coming together nicely, and none of the books I read this […]
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Pete Brown: Shakespeare’s Local
This is one of those books that I’ve owned way too long before I finally get around to reading them: The discursive — in the best sense –, rollicking tale of one London (or rather, Southwark) pub from its earliest days in the Middle Ages to the 21st century, telling the history of Southwark, London, […]
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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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Ian Doescher: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars — Verily, a New Hope
Verily, a Great Entertainment “CHORUS: As our scene to space, so deep and dark, O’er your imagination we’ll hold sway. For neither players nor the stage can mark The great and mighty scene they must portray. We ask you, let your keen mind’s eye be chief – Think when we talk of starships, there they […]
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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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Ngaio Marsh: Light Thickens
“Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further. […] Ere the bat hath flown His cloister’d flight, ere to black Hecate’s summons The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums Hath rung night’s yawning […]
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January 2020 Reading
January turned out a bit of a roller coaster in RL, continuing the course things had already taken in December: not quite whiplash-inducing, but with several sickness-prone twists and turns (for however much I’d expected them to materialize) surrounding one major glorious event (which was, however, truly glorious; even if this, too, was something I’d […]
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Tony Riches: Jasper
Among January’s reading highlights was the second book of Tony Riches’s Tudor Trilogy, Jasper — the volume I’d been looking forward to the least, as it essentially covers the War of the Roses from the Lancastrian POV, which is a tale of many woes and few moments of glory, even if it culminates in Henry […]
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Dorothy Dunnett: The Game of Kings
Clearly last month’s reading highlight was the buddy read with Moonlight Reader, BrokenTune and Lillelara of the first volume of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, The Game of Kings; a tour de force piece of historical fiction set in the mid-16th century, during the reign of England’s boy king Edward VI (the son of Henry VIII) — […]
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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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Diarmaid MacCulloch: Thomas Cromwell
Masterly. Simply put, the Cromwell biography to end all Cromwell biographies. In his research for this book, MacCulloch took a fresh look at virtually every single document on which Cromwell’s vast legacy is based, and the resulting biography is a masterpiece of historical analysis which does away with many an often-repeated myth (beginning right at […]
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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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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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Responding to Moonlight Reader’s “call for papers (= titles / authors)” — there are quite a number of excellent lists out there already; anyway, here’s my contribution … or a first draft, at least. Links go to my reviews (or status updates / summary blog posts / author pages) to the extent I’ve posted any. […]
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Books With a Difference
Responding to Moonlight Reader’s “call for papers (= titles / authors)” — there are quite a number of excellent lists out there already; anyway, here’s my contribution … or a first draft, at least. Links go to my reviews (or status updates / summary blog posts / author pages) to the extent I’ve posted any. […]
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Book Covers: Young Women with Flowers
24 Festive Tasks: Door 4 – Diwali, Task 4: During Diwali, people pray to the goddess Lakhshmi, who is typically depicted as a beautiful young woman holding a lotus flower. Find 5 books on your shelves (either physical or virtual) whose covers show a young woman holding a flower and share their cover images. […]
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William Shakespeare’s Epitaph
24 Festive Tasks: Door 1 – Día de los Muertos, Task 2: Share your favorite gravestone epitaph (you know you have one). To a Shakespeare fan, there can be only one … Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And […]
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My KYD Reads … or: Harry Potter, and What Else I read in March 2018
A big thank you to Moonlight Reader for yet another fun, inventive BookLikes game! I had a wonderful time, while also advancing — though with decidedly fewer new reads than I’d origianlly been planning — my two main reading goals for this year (classic crime fiction and books written by women). Harry Potter – […]
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