The Bride of Science (subtitled: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter) is a biography of Ada Lovelace, an early 19th-century woman renowned for her mathematical ability and her friendship with Charles Babbage, creator of a very early version of the computer. She was, of course, even better known as the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron [...]
Awhile back I reviewed Alison Weir’s Innocent Traitor, the first product of a noted biographer who has made the leap to historical fiction. Having written nonfiction about the Tudors for many years, Weir now allows her imagination free play as she roams about inside the minds and lives of the members of that famous and [...]
Gilead is a completely strange and lovely book. It’s the sort of novel that shouldn’t work, on so many levels, and yet it does. Brilliantly. Which just goes to show that a truly gifted author can break every rule and create something utterly compelling.
It’s a slow story. There’s no strong plotline to pull you along, [...]
I picked this one up in a bookstore awhile ago and was fascinated with the concept, though not enough to lay down actual money for it — I waited till it came to my library. It’s a memoir about how writer and film critic David Gilmour allowed his teenaged son Jesse to drop out of school [...]
In reviewing this book, I’ll resist the temptation to tell you the story of how Nathan made me buy it, and the story of his deep discontent with the book’s title and the sunflower on the cover, and even the completely irrelevant story of how he ran a red light, got a [...]
Over Christmas vacation this year I decided to read through some of my old favourite books, going right back to the young-adult novels I enjoyed as a pre-teen and teen. I reread a lot — though less than I used to; these days I make much more of an effort to seek out recommendations for [...]
Thanks, everyone, for entering my fabulous New Year’s Book Giveaway contest. Apparently, from what people have told me, this was a hard contest. It seemed so easy to me that I was worried about it being too easy … but I realize now, that’s because I already know what all the books on my [...]
You have just one more day to enter my contest and Win! Fabulous! Prizes!! Tomorrow night before bed (that is, about 10:00 pm Newfoundland standard time) I will go to my hotmail inbox and sort through the contest entries to find the five most correct. If there are more than five completely correct responses, I [...]
We’re nearly at the end of 2007, and it’s time for me to look back through a year’s worth of book reviews and pick my ten favourites. Hard to know what criteria to apply — “literary quality” is such a nebulous thing, and not always what makes a book memorable for me. I guess I’ll [...]
So, I’ve reached the end of my non-fiction reading list for Lent 2007. The final tally is
19 books
17 read in their entirety during Lent; two started earlier but finished during Lent
One Biblical book read (Luke)
One cheat, but only for work (had to reread the novel Waiting for Time for a class)
Favourite and most [...]
