About stories of all kinds
Volunteering at my local library, I got to check out all the new books as they came out. I remember when I first laid eyes on this one and singled it out as "of interest," but that category was so full already that I didn't pick it up immediately. Fortunately, it reappeared on my radar… Continue reading The Reappearance of Mrs. Houdini: A Review
“I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them.” [She said.] “It’s work enough to read them sometimes,” I returned. David Copperfield I've been slowly coming to terms with the fact that I will not be able to read every book in the world (along with Jesse… Continue reading Books: The Beautiful and DNF’d
Long before I started this blog, I had ideas for posts about books I've read. And here we are three years later and I'm finally finishing this review of two books I read back-to-back in the summer of 2016: Black Rabbit Summer and Black Rabbit Hall. I wanted to do this review/comparison because I thought,… Continue reading Chasing Rabbits: Black Rabbit Summer and Black Rabbit Hall
Ah, time travel: creator of paradoxes, destroyer of timelines, and conveniencer of plots. I like a good time travel story, whether it be the new Who (Moffat loops and all) or the good old Back to the Future. Time travel tends to frequent science fiction, but is also exploited for its potential in the historical… Continue reading Time in Flux (Capacitor): Ruby Red and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
In any work of writing, even this blog, whether we are conscious of it or not, there is a voice that comes through. It's what you hear in your head while you're reading. It's how it makes you feel--is it whimsical? Informative? Tense? Know-it-all? It's up to how you interpret what you're reading on the… Continue reading Writing in Style: Authorial Voice
The desert isn't as empty as we think. Sands crawl over sands, rippling with wind or the tracks of sidewinders. Ruins gape, abandoned by the men who made them and left for an inheritance of the relentless sun. But it's not only elements, lesser creatures, and the relics of human habitation that fill the desert.… Continue reading Gods and Saints: Setting in Story
Canadian literature. Yawn. Why are we like this? Probably because Canadian art, like that of other British Commonwealth nations, is a) recent: comparatively speaking to other literary traditions; b) slow to develop: why make your own art when your "mother" nation has a pre-established canon?; and c) difficult to maintain: why patronize upstarts when, again,… Continue reading On-Line English Literature Discussion: Canadian Authors
Two summers ago, I read two historical fiction books in pretty close succession, both mysteries, that, while gripping enough in the act of reading, I found less than satisfying afterwards. I was a bit puzzled as to why this was, because one of them, The Dante Club, was written by an author I had previously… Continue reading Emphasis on “Historical,” Weak on “Fiction”: The Dante Club and The Blackest Bird
Fictitiously Yours 