About stories of all kinds
The Prince: On the Art of Power by Niccolò Machiavelli is not, as I once thought, a veiled political commentary disguised in a fictional account of a prince. But neither is it solely theoretical philosophizing about a hypothetical ideal state of human governance.
What are book clubs for if not making you read books you never would have otherwise? Some you find you enjoy, and others... well, let's say I know my own tastes pretty well.
This is my first Classics Club spin since joining, so I'm quite excited to see what I get to read next! I have been steadily working through the books on my list, but I still have the vast majority of them to go, so let's do this. My method of picking which 20 of my… Continue reading Classics Club Spin #32
Blurb for The Flight of the Falcon by Daphne du Maurier As a young Italian courier for Sunshine Tours, Armino Fabbio led a pleasant, if humdrum life—until he became circumstantially involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome, a woman who had suddenly and startlingly reminded Armino of someone in his past.… Continue reading Bird of Prey: The Flight of the Falcon Review
I don't really know why I picked this up beyond a sense of curiosity and being in the mood for a bit of folksy literature. I knew of Woody Guthrie as a singer-songwriter... but I had no idea he was also a writer of prose and somewhat of an artist.
So, after years of seeing the lists, the spins, the challenges, and the memes, I am finally joining the Classics Club! This is pretty big for me as I've had some bad experiences with booklists/challenges and vowed never to get myself into one again, but never say never, I guess. I actually feel good about… Continue reading Classics Club Book List
I did, once upon a time, read Ulysses by James Joyce. And I did, once upon a Mediterranean cruise, enjoy parts of it along with some quotes I saved. Seeings it is Bloomsday, June 16, the singular day on which all 265,000 words and 18 episodes of the novel canonically take place, I can hardly… Continue reading ‘A feminist: (masculinely)…’
The Albertian monks’ preservation of Memorabilia from before the Fallout (worldwide nuclear destruction) is a constant theme in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. The monks attempt to maintain a history exclusively with Memorabilia, “meaning… only… books and papers, not… interesting hardware,” because their experiences with an intercontinental launching… Continue reading Memento: Relics and Memorabilia in A Canticle for Leibowitz*
It’s a shameless shtick, I know, to make a post about green on St. Patrick’s Day. However, I’ve thought about making posts about books with colours in their titles for a long time, so I might as well take advantage of the coincident events to start with books I’ve read with the colour “green” in… Continue reading 5 Books With “Green” in Their Titles
The opening line sets the tone for The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti: “When Loo was twelve years old, her father taught her how to shoot a gun.” The scene following sets up a lot of the critical threads that emerge throughout the novel: the guns, the relationship between Loo and her… Continue reading The Twelfth Day of Christmas: The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
Fictitiously Yours 