A few weeks ago, I put out a plea on my Facebook page – I had overlooked choosing a book for this year’s Banned Book Week. While emmalita sang the praises of This One Summer a book I already had on my to read list (which I did read that week), another friend gamely suggested that I read A Farewell to Arms since he was reading it as well. I checked out the audio offerings, and decided to give it a go since John Slattery […]
Childhood favorite revisited, more than holds up.
I must have read this book dozens of times when I was a kid (I think I had an illustrated version as well, but I can’t find it, nor any record of it online, so far all I know I may have made it up?), but I haven’t read it, oh I don’t know, at least since middle school? I also never read any of L.M. Montgomery’s other books. No idea why I did this. Even as a kid, I was all over sequels, a little […]
Ladies and Phalluses and Killers and Artists
Ellepkay won a A Perilous Undertaking as a set of CDs, but discovered that she already had a copy. She offered the CDs, and I gladly took her up on her offer. The audio version was about 12 1/2 hours, and I listened to it over two days. It was an entertaining listen. The narrator, Angele Masters, did a good job of portraying the energy of the book. If it’s set in Victorian London, there must be a salacious sex subplot. We assume, don’t we, […]
Love is the Engine Which Drives Our Heroes
I’ve been sitting on this review for several days, trying to let the experience of rereading The Half-Blood Prince settle in my mind so I could look at it from a larger angle. The plot of the story is crucial; it shows how the war could so easily fall to the side of Voldemort, and sets up the game plan for defeating him. But it isn’t the only crucial aspect of the narrative, this is also a story of being on the cusp of adulthood, […]