Claire | August 19, 2010
To categorize Cormac MCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as primarily a “literary” novel seems to me to be doing it a disservice, because what it really is, and what it functions best as, is a Western with a literary bite. All the trademarks of the traditional Western novel are here (and beautifully so) – the [...]
Claire | August 14, 2010
To Reference: Top Fantasy Series, Fantasy 100, YA Fantasy, Locus, Nebula and Hugo awards, Locus Index Trusted Authors: Fantasy: Ursula K. LeGuin, Patrick Rothfuss, Garth Nix, Peter Dickinson Romantic fantasy: Robin McKinley, Juliet Marillier, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Jules Watson Fallback (flawed or not quite to my taste but enjoyable): Stephen Donaldson, C.J. Cherryh, Robert Jordan, Diana [...]
Claire | July 25, 2010
I recently finished reading Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, and it was delicious. Well-done whodunits are extremely hard to find, and a mystery which doubles as a romance with thoughtful bits of social and religious commentary along the way is even rarer. The Franchise Affair is all of these, a thoroughly engaging and satisfying novel [...]
Claire | April 6, 2010
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, [...]
Claire | January 20, 2010
I cannot decide what I think of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was given to me as a birthday present and is therefore required reading. It is both elusive and precise, disturbing and faintly comforting. It took me a good four chapters to pin down the literary style which it reminded me of [...]
Claire | November 13, 2009
“Gone mad, they say, as if madness a place you can go to, a land you can find yourself in, trapped in.” “So there I was, pretending not to watch, and there he was, pretending not to be watched; and you may see the very same thing, Sir, at any polite gathering of society ladies [...]
Claire | November 13, 2009
