Seldom have I started my Lenten non-fiction reading journey in a less auspicious way. I went to the library to look around for books that grabbed my eye — I’m usually looking for things at least tangentially related to religion, spirituality or theology, although in some cases the connection is tenuous and clear only to [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Uncategorized’
January 9, 2009
Contest Complete!
The contest is complete and the winners have been chosen! Details are at http://trudymorgancole.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/winners/ . Thanks for playing, everyone, and I’ll be back with another contest next January!
December 26, 2008
Top Ten Books of 2008, and a contest!
This was a tough one! I read so many great books this year, and I chose the top ten not on any official scale of literary quality but just on what lingered with me the longest — which books, when I scrolled back through the year’s reading list, evoked a reaction of “Yes! That one [...]
October 30, 2008
Come Away: Song of Songs, by Anne Hines
This is an interesting concept — a book about how the Song of Songs came to be written. It’s not the traditional story: the book is not viewed as a love song written by or about King Solomon. Rather, it’s a celebration of feminine sexuality and spirituality tucked in between the severe and masculine prophets [...]
October 5, 2008
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
Everybody loves Neil Gaiman, don’t they? At least that’s what I find. Avid readers speak of his brand of offbeat fantasy, both in traditional-type books and graphic novels, in tones of hushed awe and reverence.
It was probably a mistake that the first Gaiman book I picked up was American Gods. This was in my pre-Compulsive-Overreader-blogging days, [...]
September 26, 2008
The Way of Women, by Lauraine Snelling
The Way of Women is another of those books of Christian women’s fiction (not a romance in this case) that I occasionally pick up in hopes of a light and spiritually refreshing read. Sometimes it works out really well, other times, not so much. This wasn’t a bad book, but it was one of the [...]
July 4, 2008
The Bride of Science, by Benjamin Woolley
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 [...]
July 4, 2008
The Lady Elizabeth, by Alison Weir
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 [...]
July 4, 2008
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
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, [...]
June 10, 2008
The Film Club, by David Gilmour
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 [...]
