My first Angela Carter read was The Magic Toyshop. Somewhere I'd gotten the idea that I would like this novel without any real understanding of its author, so I was surprised by just how magical that toyshop really was, but I recognized something about Angela Carter that led me to
I'm so incredibly excited about Persephone Reading Week that I think I'll need to take the week off work to celebrate it properly. That was a temptation when I first heard about the event, and I started thinking "themes" and then spotted a collection of films about wartime England at
It's partly because of the beautiful image, that I first saw posted here, and partly because I so recently enjoyed re-reading some childhood fantasy favourites, and partly because I've recently finished two other reading challenges for the year (Canada Reads and Canada Reads Independently), and partly because in taking a
Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) If I'd looked back to my childhood reading, I would have described myself as being much more comfortable with witches and dragons, enchantments and whangdoodles, than
If Oprah had had a bookclub in 1954, she would have chosen Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel. And I say this because, despite the ongoing debate amongst booklovers about the significance of Oprah's Bookclub, she has featured many of my favourite writers (e.g. Jane Hamilton, Ursula Hegi, Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Kingsolver,
