One of the purest joys of the holiday season is doing my best to match the right gifter to the correct giftee. When we manage to to send just the right gift, and the bliss getting a book just for you, is one of my favorite traditions. I have been in a cooking rut, and I knew resident Cannonball Foodie ardaigle would probably have an idea of a cookbook that should be sitting on my kitchen counter. I wasn’t wrong, and it comes with an awesome […]
Dig a Little Deeper, Read a Little Harder
For the first time in three years I am giving up on the Read Harder Challenge. Changing jobs in November (yay!) and the coming holiday bonanza has cut more severely than I anticipated into my reading time. I have knocked my review goal down to 75 from 78 and jettisoned four books from my to read list that would have completed this year’s challenge. (Expect to see some of them next year.) The book I didn’t purge was this one, August. One of the challenges […]
A Trilogy Comes to a Close, and I’m Okay With That
I usually set myself up with reading landmarks throughout the year, to keep things interesting for myself. It also helps to keep me on pace. The past three years I have ‘read with my ears’ Tessa Dare’s Stud Club series. It was a random choice, to pick this series to enjoy via audiobook, but I’ve stuck with it and it been for the good. The narrator, Rosalyn Landor, handles the text superbly and I’m fairly certain she improves upon Dare’s early, sometimes uneven, work. Because […]
The Real in the Title Means Nothing
I always get a smidge nervous reviewing short works and book club choices. This one is both. Exciting times friends! My immediate takeaway when I finished was that it may be too absurdist for me. But that doesn’t quite grasp the idea I was after. From my limited experience with Stoppard, he is always playing with words, playing with meaning, playing with intent, and has no problem (perhaps prefers) to have his characters speaking at cross purposes. What that does to a reader is leave […]