Louise Penny's Still Life Headline, 2005 Some of you might recall my eye-rolling, woulda-been-snarky-if-I-wasn't-so-darned-Canadian letter to The Public Library late-spring this year. I offer this post to balance the scales, for there is another staff member there whom I actually look forward to seeing behind the counter. She started a conversation
If you've read both of these authors, you're probably wondering what they're doing here, sharing a title and a post like this. But as I was reading them, the other evening before bed, I was struck by a fundamental connection, in the way that I was read these novels (not
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) Signet-Penguin, 1992 In Dracula, you might expect to find a traditional tale of fright, narrated by the guy sitting next to the campfire, who's holding the end of the flashlight (er, torch) so that his face is illuminated in the spookiest way possible. But, no. Bram
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 Emma Bovary and I have met before, but we were not long acquainted. I started to read Flaubert's novel in between high school and university, but I never finished it. Not even close, actually. When we last moved house, I
I was planning to keep all our Read-A-Thon updates in a single refresh-able post, but even I got tired of scrolling down that far. And, okay, the fact that I accidentally deleted the whole thing in a single blurry-eyed moment? It required precious reading time be spent reconstructing. So the
