Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1988) – There are several books on my shelves that I must reread every couple years because I miss them. The Lord of the Rings is one of them (along with Dune, Harry Potter, and the Modesty Blaise books). I guess I originally read it in the seventies and have reread it consistently through the years. Although I’ll try not to compare the book with the movie, after you’ve seen Viggo and Elijah as Aragorn and Frodo, it’s […]
Showing up late, hitting them all in one post
I’m just going to get this out of the way from the start – I read a lot of books this year. A lot. And I started a lot of reviews, because some of them were excellent, and some of them were horrible, and all of them were review worthy. But… between a completely not-user-friendly borrowed computer saga, the nonsense that is our entire world right now, and a year that would just not quit beating up on me and those I loved, well, not […]
Visiting the Land of Stories
On the recommendation of a friend, I bought The Wishing Spell for my 9 year old daughter last year for our family winter solstice book exchange. She devoured it and immediately began urging me to read it. “Mom, you’ll really like it. It’s so good!” So far in her life I’ve always been the one making recommendations of what to read. She was very excited to have a book she wanted to share with me. “It’s as good as Harry Potter!”, the highest praise she can […]
if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back
I finally got around to finishing N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. I read the first book, The Fifth Season, sometime in 2016 and was mostly waiting for the next two to be published before diving back in. They are phenomenal books, if extremely bleak. However, (and take note grimdark fans) Jemisin manages to create this bleakness without raping her female characters every other page. Bonkers, I know. Survival is paramount in the Stillness. If you cannot contribute to the survival of your people, community, or […]