Category: Miscellany

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Miscellany

Food for Thought, from Father Brown

This little gem of a passage, from The Blue Cross, in The Complete Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton:

"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. 

I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. 

In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen."
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Memes Miscellany To Be Read Books

Ten Books I Said Nay To

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we have a Spring Cleaning freebie. So here are ten books I recently said Nay! to.

1 / The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh Because it turned out to be Vampire + Melodrama + YA genre, and I’m afraid I’ve outgrown that.

2 / Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse Because it’s an amazing series but only the first book is out yet and I’d rather wait and then binge-read.

3 / Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker Because I was really looking forward to this till I came across a very different perspective.

4 / Soulswift by Megan Bannen Because I got to know it has a tragic end, and I can’t stomach one of those right now.

5 / Snake Eyes by Hillary Monahan Because although it was extremely well written, it was also a very grotesque (for me) tale about reptile humanoids.

6 / The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan Because although it’s rare to find a YA book dealing with disability with such sensitivity, this book seemed relentlessly bleak.

7 / Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer Because this turned out to be exceptionally boring with characters that were all very “cold fish”.

8 / Lucy Anne Trotter Series by Anya Wylde Because this didn’t turn out to be as funny as I had hoped, and rather contrived.

9 / Corrag by Susan Fletcher Because it reminded me too much of Outlander, and I’m not sure I want to read something along similar lines at the moment.

10 / Planetfall series by Emma Newman Because I really liked the premise but other readers have warned it’s not a read for pandemic times.

Any of these sound familiar to you? What’s your spring-cleaning mission been like?

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Miscellany

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Read for the Cloak & Dagger 2021 Challenge: Book 3 & the Historical Fiction 2021 Challenge: Book 5

Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.

The Plot:

Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.

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