Reading Projects « Buried In Print

Once Upon a Time: Chatting about Middles

In my first post about this year’s Once Upon a Time reading, I mentioned all the books that I have, since, finished reading, though at the time I was just beginning:

Image links to Challenge AnnouncementImage by Melissa Nucera

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993), Bill Willingham’s 1001 Nights of Snowfall (2006), Charles de Lint’s The Dreaming Place (1990), Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Carol [...]

Miles Franklin Award Winner 1978: Tirra Lirra by the River

“Food and hot tea lift my spirits.” So says Nora Porteous, who has returned to her family home in Australia, a “wretched and slothful old woman”.

1978; Penguin Books, 1984

Well, some might think her so. Wretched. Slothful. Old. At least, she muses that it’s possible. But Nora works against that impression.

She aims to “talk and [...]

Daniel Glattauer’s Love Virtually (2006; 2011)

It began when I was a girl, with books like Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs and Norma Fox Mazer’s I, Trissy.

These stories invited me directly into characters’ private thoughts, via letters written to a trusted recipient and journal entries written for the writer’s own eyes.

Trans. Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch, German 2011 [...]

Stardust Readalong, Hosted by Stainless Steel Droppings

My experience with Neil Gaiman is relatively limited: Odd and the Frost Giants and the audio production of The Graveyard Book. Stardust is a very interesting third to add, and all the more so given that I have been reading the version illustrated by Charles Vess.

1997; DC Comics, 2007 Illus. Charles Vess

Many [...]

Once Upon a Time – Beginnings

It began with an unreasonable number of books. (Doesn’t it always?) I thought last year’s list would be inspirational, but it hovered in the background, with other titles more insistent, and this year’s OUAT reading has been a flurry of all-over-the-place fragments so far.

I haven’t finished anything yet, but I have been reading since [...]

House of Anansi 45 Project, In Hindsight

Towards the end of 2012, I was overwhelmed by the idea of being just one indie-minded reader in a literary world dominated by mega-publishers and mega-retailers, unsure how to affect change, how to respond to the sense of despair swelling within my reading heart and mind.

I decided that making a change, even just One Reader [...]

Irish Short Story Month, Mary Lavin

In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains.

Hoping that “readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they might already be too familiar [...]

Events and plans 2013: Read-o-lutions

So, first, there is the matter of 2012. That which came before.

My spreadsheet lists 240 books, my GoodReads shelf 247 (it’s an imperfect, yet perfectly bookish world) and I’ve updated the pages of Books Discussed and added a list of favourite titles.

My reading year ended in a burst of indie-press love. (Yes, there [...]

“Amundsen” Alice Munro

Beginning with an arrival and ending with a departure, readers might think “Amundsen” a more conventionally told tale.

Random House, 2012

(Thinking about the last story, “To Reach Japan”, which began with a departure and ended with an arrival, I mean.)

And, yet, both this arrival and departure actually unfold in the past; Vivien [...]

“Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” Alice Munro

The reader is introduced to Colin’s brother, Ross, when he’s wearing both hats, cutting the lawn in front of the school, one of the hats being a floppy pink strawhat that his mother wore in the garden.

He is viewed through the window, Colin and his work-mates on one side of the glass, the principal [...]