Month: July 2021
The Dazzling Blogger Award
The Dazzling Blogger Award, designed by Helen at Crispy Confessions, recognizes bloggers who excel in at least one major area of blogging: writing skills, engagement, social media marketing, or content. It was a huge surprise when Steve from A London Miscellany informed me the other day that he’d nominated me for this award. Steve, thank you […]
Read MoreJune 2021 and Mid-Year Reading Recap
Sigh. Well, I think posting a monthly (and even half-year) reading recap a full three weeks into the next month has to be some sort of record, even for me, but here we are. And I admit that at this point I’d even been contemplating holding off another week so as to combine this with […]
Read MoreDorothy L. Sayers: The Five Red Herrings
Dorothy L. Sayers is occasionally accused of having gotten too caught up in her research for a given book; and the two mysteries that routinely come up in this context are The Nine Tailors (bell ringing, published in 1934) and, well, The Five Red Herrings (1931), which, although chiefly concerned with fishing and painting, also […]
Read MoreChimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun completely bowled me over when I read it a few years ago. Purple Hibiscus, too, took me in, though never as absolutely, when I read it the following year; for a first novel, it’s very impressive indeed. I seem to be doing somewhat less well with Adichie’s […]
Read MoreAgatha Christie: The Seven Dials Mystery
The Seven Dials Mystery marks our second (and in Bundle’s case, alas, final) meeting with Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent and Scotland Yard Superintendent Battle, both of whom we first encountered in The Secret of Chimneys. While they both were (key) supporting characters there, here Bundle gets star billing, and that’s a very good thing, because […]
Read MoreMolly Thynne: He Dies and Makes No Sign
One of the standout books of last year’s holiday reading was Molly Thynne’s The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’, the first of her three Dr. Constantine books, and I instantly resolved to read more books by her. It turns out, though, that POV may be important to my enjoyment of a book (who knew?!), and […]
Read MoreGeorgette Heyer: Duplicate Death
This is the penultimate of Georgette Heyer’s Inspector Hemingway mysteries, and while in other books Hemingway and his former boss, D.I. Hannasyde — as whose sergeant Hemingway appears in the first four novels of the eight-book arc — occasionally make reference to previous cases they’ve been involved in, outside of the fact that the four […]
Read MoreLeonard Gribble: The Arsenal Stadium Mystery
I’d set this as my book to accompany the England vs. Germany match during this year’s European football / soccer championships but I should probably make it clear that it wasn’t the fact that Germany lost (deservedly) in a major tournament match against England for the first time in decades that made me lose my […]
Read MoreDorothy L. Sayers: Clouds of Witness
June being Dorothy L. Sayers’s birthday, a revisit of her books was in the cards anyway — and speaking of which, the topic of this year’s summer reading project pretty quickly also determined which books I would be picking: Clouds of Witness, where card sharping is a key plot element, and The Five Red Herrings, […]
Read MoreEllen Wilkinson: The Division Bell Mystery
The Division Bell Mystery is one of my favorite BLCC republications to date — though not on account of the actual mystery, which, setting (The Houses of Parliament) aside, doesn’t have much going for it: the “locked room” / impossible crime scenario has (as even series editor Martin Edwards acknowledges in his introduction) a plot […]
Read MoreHarriet Rutland: Blue Murder
Harriet Rutland (real name: Olive Shimwell née Seers) only published three novels: I had (largely) enjoyed, even without being overly impressed with them, her first two ventures into detective fiction, Knock, Murderer, Knock and Bleeding Hooks, both of which feature a sort of “extracurricular” Scotland Yard detective named Winkley, but I had decided to leave […]
Read MoreGary Corby: The Ionia Sanction
The Ionia Sanction is the second book in Gary Corby’s mystery series set in the Athenian Republic of Pericles and the great philosophers, and I picked it as an introduction to the “actual” book I’d been planning to include in my Summer Games reading project — the series’s third book, which is set during the […]
Read MoreJohn Steinbeck: The Moon Is Down
My final venture into John Steinbeck’s oeuvre in the context of the (Dead) Authors in Residence challenge, and once more I found confirmation of everything that made me a fan of Steinbeck’s all the way back in my teens: vision and prescience of judgment, exquisitely fine characterization and, perhaps most of all, infinitely great humanity. […]
Read MoreUrsula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea
While my first two Le Guin reads for the (Dead) Authors in Residence challenge were both taken from Le Guin’s final years, for my last book I went back to her very beginning and picked the first book of her Earthsea Cycle. And, while I know that this is an awardwinning milestone of (YA) fantasy […]
Read MoreMystery Writers of America Presents: Odd Partners
A few years ago, I read a Mystery Writers of America short story compilation named Face Off, which featured short stories where two different authors’ series detectives / protagonists teamed up to solve a given crime, with each of the authors writing part of the respective story. I thought that was an interesting (and surprisingly […]
Read More2021 Mid-Year Reading Statistics
I didn’t think of grabbing my stats graphics on June 30, so the first books of July 2021 have already crept into the stats, but FWIW, here we go. Still plenty of mysteries — no wonder, what with two reading projects dedicated to Golden Age mysteries alone — but by and large I’m happy with […]
Read MoreAn Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “Z”
This is the final post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with […]
Read MoreAn Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “Y”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
Read MoreAn Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “X”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
Read MoreAn Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “W”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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