Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
Carol Shields
Republic of Love
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“The Beggar Maid” was originally published in “The New Yorker” in June 1977.
June 27, 1977
It’s hard to imagine that chunk of glossy pages, for it’s one of the longer stories (with “Mischief”) in the collection.
It’s also hard to imagine reading “The Beggar Maid” without knowing everything about Rose that you’ve learned [...]
Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother Translator Geoffrey Strachan (French) Graywolf Press, 2011
A Graywolf Press publication, a contender for The Tournament of Books, with a gorgeous and haunting cover image: all excellent reasons for picking up a copy of The Last Brother without reading a single word.
And then you meet Raj. It’s clear that he [...]
No need to wonder whether you fit in this novel: Harriet Baxter is speaking directly to you, Reader.
Even before the novel has properly begun, she is saying “Reader, if you wonder — as I suspect you may…”
Even though you weren’t wondering yet.
And, on the next page, she suggests that you “may also [...]
It’s our last week to discuss A Game of Hide and Seek, officially, but if you’re late to the party, and are still reading — even if quite some time has passed — please, feel free to comment.
But for those of us who have read the novel through already, and have already chatted about [...]
In which I chatter about Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, the Mythlopedia series, the third in Bill Willingham’s Fables series, and make hasty notes about my other reading for the un-challenge.
The Lightning Thief is intended to be larger than life. Percy Jackson is not a normal boy.
He is a half-blood, half-mortal and half-immortal. [...]
We want that “paradoxical search for familiarity combined with strangeness; want more of the same – but with a difference,” says Victor Watson in Reading Series Fiction.
Watson’s book considers series written for children, but it still applies, doesn’t it? There’s nothing like reading a series.
Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is one of my [...]
“Flo said to watch out for White Slavers.” The opening line.
There’s Flo with her tales of abuse and mistreatment, with the litany of threats, near and far, posed to women and girls.
She also warns Rose about the retired undertaker, with his also-retired hearse, about the the way that he trawls the countryside, “looking for [...]
That’s what the LA Times calls The Newspaper of Claremont Street: “Every word of this spare little novel is right.”
(You could say the same of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, which I read earlier this year; this is the only other of her novels on my shelf, so I’m not sure if she is known for [...]
It’s 1952, in the hottest summer that Paris has had since before the war.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2012
Beatrice writes to her brother, Marvin, saying “Paris was terrible”, and she has little else to report.
She has travelled there, at Marvin’s request, to look for Marvin’s son, Julian.
But although there were [...]
In her biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman posits that two works influenced Elizabeth Taylor’s novel A Game of Hide and Seek.
These are Chekov’s story, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) and David Lean’s film “Brief Encounter” (1945).
If you haven’t read/finished A Game of Hide and Seek, you might rather not read [...]
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