"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
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
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,
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
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
