I've been thinking a lot about my plans for this challenge because last year's was so satisfying. You know the feeling, when you've just finished a really good book? It's hard to follow up that reading experience: you can't choose something that you know will fall short of the freshly-set-satisfied
Who does paper mâché anymore? That's what a neighbour asked in response to our description of the Black Swan Project, which has completely and entirely devoured our main room and a good chunk of my reading time this month. A lot of my hobbies directly conflict with reading time. Even though
Arlene Perly Rae's Everybody's Favourites Penguin, 1997 One of the quotes that appears as an epigraph to this volume felt particularly poignant to me this summer: "One's first book, kiss, home run, is always the best." It's courtesy of Clifton Fadiman (yes, father of the infamous Ex Libris author) and
Monica Dickens' Mariana Penguin, 1961 (1940); Persephone Books, 1999 Persephone No. 2 Monica Dickens is an author I thought of as a children's author first; I read her World's End books and Follyfoot stories as a girl, repeatedly. Not as compulsively as I read and re-read other stories, and I
Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants Harper Collins, 2009 Everything I know about Norse mythology, I learned from playing World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade. Okay, maybe I picked up a little from Jane Smiley too. But overall, it's a weak spot with me, my knowledge limited to daily quests
