My thanks to NetGalley and Yale University Press for a review copy of this excellent telling of the story of London in the 1600s. London in the seventeenth century was the London of Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, of diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot, of the popular rebellion…
Shelf Control #128: The Red Room by Nicci French
Wednesday, the 24th of Febuary, and time for Shelf Control once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it--what…
Bookquotes: Quotes from Books (149)
Photo by Miggy Rivera on Pexels.com ...character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)
Winding Down
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Nature moves cyclically--everything that starts also comes to an end. A moment, an hour, a day. As the sun rises each morning bringing with it new hope, a fresh start, every evening too, it sets, and then comes the time when all creatures and us humans too (at least we…
Shelf Control #127: When the Wind Blows by Cyril Hare
Wednesday, the 17th of February, and time for Shelf Control once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it--what…
More Cat (Pun) Book Titles
Via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Felix_aprilmaze_08.jpg#filelinks Last I had a short post on Cat Pun book titles (here), based partly on some of these that a friend and I used to make up for fun. We had lists that ran into pages and pages but I still haven't found either the emails or the note pads I…
Nicholas Nickleby Readalong Week 2 Post #NicholasNickleby2021
This is the second of my posts on Nicholas Nickleby, part of a readalong of the book being organized by Fanda Classiclit over February and March 2021 (master post here). This week we read chapters 12–21. Last week, we met some of our principal characters. After the death of their father, Nicholas and Kate Nickleby…
Bookquotes: Quotes from Books (148)
Photo by Allan Mas on Pexels.com You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to…
Book Review: West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
My thanks to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for a review e-copy of this one. West with Giraffes is an endearing, and also heart-rending piece of historical fiction. The story is set around a truly extraordinary real life occurrence that took place in 1938. Two giraffes (later to be called Lofty and Patches) travelled to…
Shelf Control #126: The Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris
Wednesday, the 10th of February, and Shelf Control time once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it--what its…
Literary Potpourri 
