All book reviews go here.
For this week’s Top 10 Tuesday meme, we have a Valentine’s Day freebie, so let’s showcase some of those OTP (One True Pairings) that deserve extra attention today. Disclaimer: All of this is intended in good fun only!
It’s time for #6degrees. Start with the monthly read, add six books, and see where you end up. The 6 Degrees of Separation Meme is hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best. The book for December 2022 is The Snow Child by by Eowyn Ivey.
Snow Child is a retelling of an old (and rather sad) folktale about the little girl that a childless couple finds in the woods, but she is made of snow and ice and cannot stay on. It reminded me of a few unusual retellings of folk tales and how the fictional and the real converge in our worlds.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday meme has us looking at books that give us cozy vibes. Here’s a list to to keep us warm!
Everything sounds hopeful and cozy when Anne says it.
Because there’s so much happiness in finding your own tribe.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday topic is a very cool one: Books with Geographical Terms in the Title. I had a lot of fun looking up book titles with world geography terms.
I guess the titles and book covers are self explanatory. Except for The Bride of Lammermoor, where the reference is not to any “moor” as I’d originally thought, but to the Lammermuir Hills.
Any interesting geographical places that you uncovered this Tuesday?
Is “tri-monthly” the right word? June, July, August — loads of books and shows that I discovered and even liked (wonder of wonders)! Interestingly, in pretty much all of these, I also found that the blurb or the trailer had been misleading. Here’s a (long post) wrap up.
A rather strange and underrated historical fantasy work set in the 1880s involving a “road trip” from New York to Scotland. The journalist heroine sets out to help her odd brother (and also escape her marriage). Then she finds herself embroiled in a blackmail plot and with her young nephew and niece in tow. This book really defies genre and age groupings. The suspense is slow to build-up, the “fantasy” part is very, very subtle. I even thought there was some LGBTQ representation in this 1976 book. Also historically accurate, as can be expected from Aiken.
A very quirky new adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s more complex mysteries. This cryptic question changes every time: Why didn’t they ask Evans? Why didn’t they ask Evans? Why didn’t they ask Evans? Wait at least till Episode 2 for the show to really get going.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt asks us to look at “Books I Love That Were Written Over Ten Years Ago“. Well, pretty much all the books I love were written over ten years ago. So this was easy, but I did try my best to mix up the genres as much as I could.
Do we share any favorites from here?
Book: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip
Published: 1973
Tropes: Short Story/ Novella, Knight quests, Riddles, Puns, Folktales
Readalikes: Alice in Wonderland, The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Edward Lear
The mad King Magnus sends his knight Caerles on a quest, to look for the Throme of the Erril of Sherill. (A tongue twister, if ever there was one — and it’s not a throne, by the way). If Caerles succeeds, he gets to marry the king’s daughter, who has been locked up in the castle and has never ever laughed. The problem is: the Throme doesn’t exist. Or does it?
“You are cruel and loveless, you and your wanting.”
“I know,” Magnus Thrall whispered. “I know. The Throme is my hope. Find it for me, Caerles.”
It seems like a wild goose chase from the beginning. And poor Caerles seems to be the only sane person in the book. I was chuckling at all his dry witticisms throughout.
“… I do not know what use it is to hurry when I do not know where I am going, and when there will be nothing to find when I get there.”
The whole novella is actually poetry in the form of prose. Does that make sense? Seriously, I’m in awe of McKillip. To pack such a riddle in such lovely words, and to then blend it with humor and pun and brilliant character sketches? This was beautiful. Mesmerizing.
“The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame.”
All of May 2022, the fantastic #Wyrd and Wonder 2022 meme is in play. Pick your very cool prompt, pick your matching SFF books. It’s all up to you whether you want to do the weekly posts, the book bingo, the readalong, or make a book tag of it all.
This year, the theme is all things forest and woodlands — and here’s a list of some of those forest setting books that I’ve found memorable. Here’s to Mother Nature, who is fascinating both on and outside of page!
Work in the past 3 months was like Godzilla. I read very little, and got nowhere on the 10 Million Reading Challenges that I had over-ambitiously planned. But I binged on mystery and detective stuff a lot, and here are a few things that kept me going.
