A striking novel of love, discovery and the culture of cold, To the Bright Edge of the World brings nineteenth-century Alaska to searing, glorious life.
Tag: reading
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: Book Review
Her Ladyship commits the not-uncommon indiscretion of reading Wolf Hall after Bring Up The Bodies, and begins to think, as she does sometimes. Though Hilary Mantel’s publishers do her the great disservice of plastering the back cover and spine of her masterpiece with recommendations from two ludicrous sources who know less about literature than Sherlock…
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Review)
‘Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. George Rochford will be tried apart, as a peer; the commoners will be tried first. The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring…
What Arya would have done in Sansa’s place: being the ramblings of a young lady who adores both Stark girls and is rather sick of the above notion being used to favour one at the expense of the other.
Let us imagine for a moment that Arya hadn’t been so fortunate as to be picked up by Yoren at Ned Stark’s execution (well, how fortunate this event actually was is debatable). What if she’d been taken by the Hound instead, or denounced by someone in the crowd, or even recognised by Joffrey, who is…
Kickass literary heroes: Another Victorian/Fantasy Mashup
Following the success of Kickass literary heroines: A Victorian/Fantasy Mashup, it is now the turn of the boys. While we will inevitably lose the feminist vibe of the original, it does seem unfair to let these bundles of awesome go unnoticed simply because of an accident of birth. Sidney Carton – A Tale of Two…
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Book Review)
When you lose someone you love in an awful way, you begin to crave aloneness. The rest of the world is uncomprehending and very likely mad as well, so why bother with it? You find yourself prepared to structure your entire life around this aloneness, or wishing you could. You want an indifferent sort of…
Kickass literary heroines: A Victorian/ Fantasy Mashup
Lyra Silvertongue – His Dark Materials Trilogy The foul-mouthed urchin who would be Eve, this twelve year old Oxford native possesses the strength of all women, navigating a multitude of dangerous, sometimes steampunk Blakean worlds of archangel assassins and tyrannical deities in a quest to restore a Truth hidden since the writing of the Bible….
God awful: ‘Labyrinth’ by Kate Mosse
Like Ken Follett, Kate Mosse is one of those unfortunate writers with a nose like a bloodhound for a good story, but who can’t write to save their lives. The reader suffers under the weight of this fact for all 700 pages of Labyrinth, Mosse’s obscenely well-reviewed novel of the Holy Grail where an obvious…
Some musings on awesome characterisation in ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins
It’s Rachel Verinder’s birthday, and the young lady has every reason to be delighted. It’s very likely that her quirky cousin Franklin Blake, who’s been staying for the last month, returns her newfound love for him and might soon propose to her. She has also inherited a pretty toy from her late, estranged uncle: an…
Sublime and Ridiculous: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Despite the rock star bestseller status, the glowing reviews and the general pandemonium surrounding this novel, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian is a very strange book indeed. This tale of a three-generation-long search for the tomb of Vlad III of Wallachia (a.k.a Dracula), brings the vampire myth gracefully into the academic world and supports its challenging…
LADYGILRAEN 