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…
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…
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…
Book Review: The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed
The Black Kids is set in 1992 around the events of the Rodney King incident, the trial in which the officers who brutalized him were acquitted, and the riots in its aftermath in LA (see Wikipedia here). The book tells the story of a teenaged Ashley Bennett who attends a posh high school and hopes…
Nicholas Nickleby Readalong Week 1 post #NicholasNickleby2021
Last week I started reading The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, for a readalong being organized by Fanda ClassicLit (details and master post here). Nicholas Nickleby is the third of Charles Dickens’ novels and was first published in serial between 1838 and 1839. For the first week, we read the first eleven chapters of…
Literary Potpourri 
