Italy & Italian Literature

Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise
Blurb: Caterina Pellegrini is a young Venetian musicologist hired by two competing cousins to find the truthful heir to an alleged treasure concealed by a once-famous, but now almost forgotten, baroque composer. Sworn to secrecy, Caterina can solve the mystery only by searching through the papers contained in the composer’s two chests that have not […]
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Festive Tasks: Door 17 – Holiday Food (Tasks 1 – 3)
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE As for the other squares where I’ve completed several tasks in a single post (Gifts, Holiday Shopping, and Correspondence), I’m dividing this into several pages, one per task. Task 1: What’s your favorite seasonal drink? Can be alcoholic or virgin, complicated cocktails, festive punches / noggs or just […]
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An 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 […]
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Daphne Du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel
Oh, I wanted to like this so much better than I ultimately did; for its glorious Cornish and Italian (Florence) settings alone, as well as for the fact that Du Maurier (as she herself insisted) apparently identified so much with this novel’s first person narrator, Philip Ashley, that at times she almost felt like she […]
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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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2020 in Facts and Figures
I already posted my main 2020 in Review and Looking Ahead to 2021 posts a while ago — only on my new blog (separate post to come) –, but I held back on my 2020 reading statistics until the year was well and truly over. And for all my good intentions when posting my mid-year […]
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2020: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
We’re still a month away from the end of the year, but my reading will probably consist mainly of Christmas books in December, and I hope and pray that life won’t come up and throw anything else at me in the final month of the year, either. So I might as well post my “Year […]
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Book Characters Turning Over a New Leaf
24 Festive Tasks: Door 4 – Japanese Culture Day, Task 2: Japanese Culture Day was first held in 1948, to commemorate the announcement of the country’s post-war constitution on November 3, 1946, which was to make a new start for Japan. Which book did you read this year where someone was searching for or starting […]
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BL-opoly, Pandemic Edition – Fourth Roll
For once my “quick roll before going to bed” is turning out just that — hooray. Knight’s entries in the Medieval Murderers series are not necessarily among my favorites, but it is clear that he knows his stuff, and I might just as well finally catch up with his protagonist Sir John de Wolfe’s earlier […]
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Dorothy L. Sayers: Love All (aka Cat’s Cradle)
Sayers Does Drawing Room Comedy When I bought the joint edition of Busman’s Honeymoon and Love All (published in 1980), the obvious pièce de résistance, for me, and the reason why I spent some time hunting down an affordable copy at all, was the stage version of Busman’s Honeymoon – the final full-length outing of […]
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Spices!
The sort of online rabbit hole one is liable to fall down in lockdown times … There’s a company named Spirit of Spice that specializes in “whole seed” spice mixes all coming in their own little mills: I’ve been a fan of theirs for quite a while, though so far I’ve been buying their products […]
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This is good to see – please pass it on to anyone who might find it useful
Reblogged from: Mike Finn Original post: ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2091994/this-is-good-to-see-please-pass-it-on-to-anyone-who-might-find-it-useful
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Patricia Moyes: Dead Men Don’t Ski
A huge shout-out to Moonlight Reader for favorably reviewing this book earlier this year and thus bringing it to my attention. Henry Tibbett and his wife Emmy are a joy to be with, and like MR and Tigus (who has also read the book in the interim), I’ll definitely be spending more time in their […]
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Spicy Red Pepper Pesto
24 Festive Tasks: Door 24 – Epiphany, Task 1: Prepare your favorite spicy dish or drink; share a picture and enjoy. (Sharing the recipe is optional.) My BFF (Gaby) and I went on our traditional pre-Christmas shopping trip to “that store” in Frankfurt yesterday. Among the many goodies and gifts for others that the trip […]
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My Favorite Books with Music as a Plot Element
24 Festive Tasks: Door 21 – Kwanzaa, Task 2: Music is an important part of a Kwanzaa celebration. Which is / are your favorite book(s) where music plays an important role in the plot? In no particular order, books (of all genres, except for artist biographies)* that I love where music plays an important […]
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