Rereading The Last Battle, our final Narnia volume in the Narniathon hosted by Calmgrove, was a peculiar experience. I loved this book as a child; I was a melancholic, disgruntled sort of girl, who felt at odds with my time and social setting, and it seems I found Lewis's picture of a civilization in decay … Continue reading #Narniathon21: The Last King of Narnia
My Throwback Thursday contribution this month is my Emerald City Book Review post Lost in Translation: Le Grand Meaulnes - if you missed the announcement a couple of days ago, this is what I'm aiming to read for Summer in Other Languages this year. Read my post to see what I thought of the book … Continue reading #ThrowbackThursday: Le Grand Meaulnes
June has sprung suddenly upon me, so it's time once more for my personal Summer in Other Languages challenge. All are invited -- if during the months of June, July and August you would like to read anything in a language you consider "other" (other than your native language, other than you usually read, or … Continue reading Summer in Other Languages 2022
And so in the course of our Narniathon reading we come to the book that C.S. Lewis started second, finished last, and yet is chronologically first in the series, including as it does an account of the creation of Narnia. In my last post on The Horse and His Boy, I explained my new theory … Continue reading #Narniathon21: The unforbidden fruit
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963) Lately I seem to have been reading a lot of amazing memoirs by women, frequently dealing with psychological manipulation and coming out of a state of subjugation or abuse. (Tara Westover's Educated being the most recent example -- and it turned out … Continue reading Beautiful Books: Two psychological masterpieces
James Lapine, Putting It Together (2021) I think that putting on a theatrical production, particularly a musical, is one of the most remarkable things we human beings can do. It requires an almost unequalled level of cooperation and working together, with manifold roles that each have to be precisely and skillfully done while serving the … Continue reading Reading the Theatre review: Putting It Together
This month's Narniathon read, The Horse and His Boy, also counts serendipitously for the 1954 Club hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings. It's going to be interesting to see what else was published in this year (notably including The first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which Lewis played … Continue reading #Narniathon21 – The Boring One
Some years ago I spent an Advent season studying the stories of people who were raised from the dead in the New Testament. All the healing stories raise so many questions for me -- I want to know more about the background of these special individuals, and what their experience might have been. I ended … Continue reading Talitha Koum: A Poem
For this month's Throwback Thursday event, I'm linking back to one of my favorite reviews that hardly anyone seemed to notice on The Emerald City Book Review: my consideration of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, part of my Reading New England challenge year. Original 1938 production of Our Town This month, as I'm celebrating Reading the … Continue reading Throwback Thursday: Our Town
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind, translated by Lucia Graves (2001) In my last Make me read it poll, there was a hot contest between The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, but the gothic novel set in a … Continue reading You made me read it: The Shadow of the Wind
