To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Well, I finished this book, finally. As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been reading it for some time. I started it before I began the library’s winter reading challenge (which I finished on or around February 22), so it was the book I picked up after Wuthering Heights). I read the sixteen books […]
It took me several months to read this book, gentle reader. As you know, it takes a Dickens book several hundred pages to get going. In this case, I think it was 450 of the 750. So I have read many other books in the interim. Apparently, it has been a while since the great […]
This book collects five novellas from Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket on the Hearth, the Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Unfortunately, a collection of five Dickens novellas is harder to read than a single, thick volume of Dickens because one of the weaknesses of Dickens’s writing is the narrative voice […]
I liked this book the most out of the Dickens I’ve read recently (notably, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations). Within it, adults do things, and there’s something at stake. This book tells a number of stories: A daughter of a Utilitarian, raised on Facts, marries a wealthy capitalist; the brother of said woman escapes his […]
I got this book in the Reader’s Digest purty edition instead of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions (as is Oliver Twist and some of the other Dickens I have). Hence, instead of $1 or $4.95 I would have paid for it, I paid $30 or so (plus shipping and handling). There was a […]
This is actually the first of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions books I have completed; not bad for a fellow who’s been accummulating them for a couple of years now. However, the Dickens Classic Editions volumes (with the green stripe on the spine instead of the red for the Classics Club books) are […]
It’s been almost ten years since I read The Lord of the Rings. At that time, I said: This is not a comic book nor a 20th century American thriller. This, on the other hand, is a graphic novel adaptation of the one book that became three movies in the 21st century. It is a […]
4 Dickens Christmas Stories You’ve Probably Never Heard Of. The stories are: The Chimes The Cricket on the Hearth The Battle of Life The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain Of course I have heard of them. I have an English degree, for cryin’ out loud. It helps that they were all collected in the […]
Ah, gentle reader. I read Douglas’s Home for Christmas in 2011 (which might make it the first in my annual tradition, but I am too lazy to double check right now–oh, heck, all right, I looked, and it does seem to be the first, and the tradition is not as annual as I would like […]
I actually started reading this before I started Nine Tomorrows by Isaac Asimov; after finishing another book, probably Red Snow and Death Had Yellow Eyes, I hit the stacks and the hardback Asimov collection caught my eye, so I read it instead of completing this collection, which underwhelmed me. First and foremost, it is not […]
Whilst researching my book report for My Ántonia, I cam across a 2004 post about the 99 best books or series of all time that I treated as a quiz as was my wont. In 2004, I’d read 16 of the 99. So how do I do now? I have put in bold the books/series […]
Over at John Kass News, guest poster Pat Hickey writes Must Reads for Young People in a Stupidly Woke World: The current secondary school English canon is dumbed down. It seems to me that everything of value went to hell when we politely considered the opinion of dim bulbs who interrogate with “Well, who’s to […]
Herein I present to you the list of books that I read in Book Year 2021, which starts the week after Christmas and runs to the week after Christmas (so this is technically Book Year 2022, wherein the Executioner novel I’ve been nibbling at a chapter a night will likely be the first entry). So, […]
Cedar Sanderson has a post called The Old Books which has numerous quotes from C.S. Lewis in it, including this one: Which led me to wonder: I have many, many fine old books from the 19th century and a bunch from the early 20th century, but how many of them do I actually read? So […]
I know, I know; you saw my post about albums I bought this weekend, and you said, Who cares about the cheap, obscure easy listening records you buy in an attempt to find something of yours on Lileks’ Thrift Store Vinyl feature on Fridays?. Well, my bibliophile friend, it’s your turn to feast your eyes […]
Well, gentle reader, as you might know, I like to post a recap of my annual reading to look at some of the trends I discover only at the end. This year, I apparently read about 126 books this year. A little more, a little less–my book year started on December 28, 2019 with the […]
I have often said that I don’t really care for the Teaching Company courses that are in my disciplines–English and Philosophy–but this one was an exception. It covers, well, the development of the novel in England and talks about its themes and whatnot from the 1700s to roughly World War II with the death of […]
Unsurprisingly, the first 40 Executioner novels do not comprise forty percent of the Amazon 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime. So I didn’t do too well on the list. Well, I didn’t do too well on the list primarily because the list is heavily weighted to modern and children’s books. Neither of which I […]
Trog links to a piece on The Federalist entitled The Top Ten Books People Lie About Reading and enumerates those which he, Trog, has read between Danica Patrick fan fiction (between two and five, because Trog counts partial reads). I’d seen the linked piece before and considered doing a list-post comparing what I’ve read to […]
I was having an imaginary conversation the other day, and I was slightly thunderstruck to discover something disquieting about me. Not that I spend a lot of time alone, and I run through a number of imaginary conversations in my head–I have known that about myself for some time. But something more sinister. Well, maybe […]