If you just search for the title on Amazon, you don’t get this book until somewhere after the 10th page of results, and it’s on the 4th page if you search just books. That’s just sad, because it’s really a good book. Well this one starts off sad, doesn’t it? We start with a young woman, Saville, traveling with her father to a new city away from her mother’s grave. And her father is an ass. He is a tailor who somehow sews things differently? […]
Hopefully, there’s nowhere to go but up!
This is a book of Pride and Prejudice variations by Elizabeth Ann West. I am not particularly pleased with any of them, although the first at least has an ending of sorts. (And there are no actual ‘dates’ like we think of today. Title fail.) Hopefully my journey through P&P variations gets better from here. “Much to Conceal” In this story, Elizabeth reveals to Jane in London what happened with the disastrous proposal in Hunsford a week prior. Jane and their Aunt Gardiner plot to […]
For my first read of 2019, I decide to learn EVERYTHING
Although probably best known for travel writing, Bill Bryson has written a number of science-based nonfiction books, and in 2003 he published a book that pondered the scientific questions and attempted to answer, well, nearly everything. The jump from travel writing to his Short History of Nearly Everything is not such a tremendous leap, however, if you think about it like a travelogue, starting with the beginning of the solar system and ending with life as we know it. In the introduction, Bryson describes how […]
We go from military campaign to political intrigue in book two
At the end of last year I finally got around to reading The Thousand Names: Book One of the Shadow Campaigns and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Thousand Names is primarily about a Vordanai military campaign, in the foreign desert land of Khandar, told through a couple of perspectives. The Shadow Throne completely switches gears and setting. It keeps Winter Inhernglass (Lieutenant and female in disguise) and Marcus d’Ivoire’s (Senior Captain) narratives and adds two new ones; Raesinia Orboan (heir to the throne) and Duke Orlanko (Ministry of Information, spy […]