Ancient Rome
Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Lindsey Davis: The Silver Pigs
Blurb: One fine day, A.D. 70, Sosia Camillina quite literally runs into Marcus Didius Falco on the steps of the Forum. It seems Sosia is on the run from a couple of street toughs, and after a quick and dirty rescue, P.I. Falco wants to know why. Falco finds out that Sosia, the niece of […]
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Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King
Blurb: A National Book Award finalist for this epic work, Adrienne Mayor delivers a gripping account of Mithradates, the ruthless visionary who began to challenge Rome’s power in 120 B.C. Machiavelli praised his military genius. Kings coveted his secret elixir against poison. Poets celebrated his victories, intrigues, and panache. But until now, no one has […]
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Festive Tasks: Door 1, Task 1 – Of Chocolate, Cathedral Architecture, and Veerry Old Bones
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Task 1: In Australia, it’s common to brag about having the “biggest ‘X’ in the Southern Hemisphere!” Biggest mall, biggest prawn (don’t ask), biggest pineapple, biggest earthworm. What does your country / city / region brag about having the best or the biggest of …? I’ve never […]
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May 2021 Reading Recap
Still a lot of work on the back end of the blog, including on my “featured authors” pages (see the right column on the main Literature page and the introduction of my April 2021 recap post). So, contrary to plans, still no new posts in my alphabet blogging series in May. However, the time-consuming back end […]
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Ursula K. Le Guin: Lavinia
The final six books of Vergil‘s Aeneid (half the epic’s length, until its abrupt and arguably premature ending) deal with Aeneas’s arrival in Latium and the hostilities ensuing after the Latian king, obeying a prophecy, promises his only daughter Lavinia’s hand to the Trojan warrior. Now, this being a heroic epos setting out to chronicle […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “U”
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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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “J”
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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An “Out of My Reach” Book Wishlist to St. Nick
24 Festive Tasks: Door 14 – St. Nicholas’ Day / Sinterklaas, Task 1: Write a book wish list to St. Nick / Santa Claus for books that you’ve been eyeing but can’t justify the expense of purchasing. (E.g., art books? Collector’s editions? Boxed sets?) Dear Saint Nick, it would be really nice if one […]
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Royalty Moonlighting as Commoners in Fiction
24 Festive Tasks: Door 10 – Russian Mothers’ Day, Task 2: Towards the end of the 17th century, there was a Russian apprentice carpenter and shipwright going by the name Peter Mikhailov in the Dutch town of Zaandam (and later in Amsterdam), who eventually turned out to be none other than Tsar Peter the Great, […]
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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 […]
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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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My Personal Literary Canon, Part 2: “Veteran” Readership
24 Festive Tasks, Door 5, Task 3: Tell us: What author’s books would you consider yourself a veteran of (i.e., by author have you read particularly many books – or maybe even all of them)? The authors by whom I’ve read the most books don’t coincide exactly, but substantially with those that I’d also consider […]
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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 – The […]
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Robert Harris: Imperium
The first part of Harris’s Cicero trilogy, and both a truly fast-paced and a well-researched piece of historical writing; covering Cicero’s ascent from young Senator to Praetorian and, eventually (and against all the odds), Consul. The first part of the book deals at length with one of Cicero’s most famous legal cases, the prosecution of […]
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KYD Green Round: Crime Scene Card Guess, Team MbD / Lillelara / TA – Robert Harris: Imperium for The Hob, District 12
Robert Harris’s Imperium has white lettering (and the lower part of the cover is black). In addition, the holders of Ancient Rome’s public offices — including this book’s protagonist, Marcus Tullius Cicero — had to organize a variety of games to entertain the citizens, so the words “game” and “games” appear repeatedly throughout the text. […]
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16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 12 – Saturnalia
Tasks for Saturnalia: Wear a mask, take a picture and post it. Leave a small gift for someone you know anonymously – a small bit of chocolate or apple, a funny poem or joke. Tell us about it in a post. –OR– Tell us: If you could time-travel back to ancient Rome, where would […]
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Gregory Doran & Antony Sher: Woza Shakespeare — Titus Andronicus in South Africa
Man, what a trip. Titus Andronicus is not, and never will be my favorite play by William Shakespeare, but having read this book, I’d give anything to be able to watch a recording of this particular production. In the 1980s (when Apartheid was still in full swing) Gregory Doran (later: Artistic Director of the Royal […]
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Ovid: Metamorphoses & Apollodorus: The Library of Greek Mythology & Plutarch: Life of Theseus
For the “Monsters” square, I decided to revisit Ovid’s Metamorphoses — I had initially only been planning on the “Perseus and Medusa” and “Theseus and the Minotauros” episodes, but David Horovitch’s fabulous reading drew me right back in and I decided to — with apologies to Odysseus and his companions at Circe’s court — go […]
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Stratford-upon-Avon — Oxford — London: Shakespeare, Hogwarts and Shopping
Stratford A Scene at the RSC Book and Gift Shop The date: June 17, 2017. The time: Approximately 10:00AM. TA and friend enter; TA asks for a shopping basket and makes straight for the shelves and display cases. An indeterminate amount of time is then spent browsing. Whenever her friend points out something and asks […]
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