Posted in Author obituary, Books on April 30, 2008 | 3 Comments »
A couple of memories from my childhood: going to the shore of the Chesapeake at Virginia Beach and seeing crabbers breaking yellow egg casings from the backs of the females’ backs, tossing the eggs back in the water and throwing the crabs into water boiling over an open fire. (Even at 10 years [...]
Posted in Author obituary on April 4, 2008 | No Comments »
I took four years of Latin in high school, and can still puzzle out a line or two if the need is great and grammar is not too crucial. I never did get to Greek though. So it was with great delight that I came across the wonderful translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by [...]
Posted in Author obituary, Science fiction on March 19, 2008 | No Comments »
One of the giants has flared out.
Arthur C. Clarke, often listed as one of the two or three greatest science fiction writers ever, died Wednesday morning in his adopted country, Sri Lanka. Clarke was perhaps best known for the book and film adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Others may know him for Childhood’s End [...]
Posted in Author obituary on February 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
William F. Buckley’s death on February 27th, 2008 is in many ways the end of a political era. Buckley came to prominence with the publication of his scathing critique of campus liberalism God and Man at Yale in the early 1950s. He went on to found the conservative journal National Review, and in conservative political [...]
Posted in Author obituary, Mysteries on February 3, 2008 | No Comments »
Washington DC is a city of contrasts - wealth and poverty, idealism and corruption, success and failure. Margaret Truman grew up in those contrasts, first as the child of a relatively obscure Midwest politician, then as the highly visible daughter of the President of the United States. Her experiences in both the public [...]
Posted in Author obituary, Books on January 4, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Harry Paget Flashman did not leap full grown from the brain of George MacDonald Fraser, who died on January 2, 2008. Fraser took a swaggering, sometimes cowardly, bully from the pages of the 19th century classic, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, set in England’s Rugby School, where Flashman is a foil for the heroes of [...]
Posted in Author obituary, Barry's Picks, Books, Characters, Fantasy on September 17, 2007 | No Comments »
It has been a tough year for readers, especially for fantasy readers, who have lost three major writers in the past several months. The latest death is that of Robert Jordan, builder of the sprawling world detailed in his Wheel of Time series.
Starting with The Eye of the World, Jordan built a vast and [...]
Posted in Author obituary, Autobiography, Books, Characters, Children's, Christian, Classics, Coming of Age, Fantasy, Jessica's Picks, Language Focus, Literary fiction, Mainstream fiction, Nonfiction, Plot, Science fiction, Sense of place, Setting, Young Adult on September 7, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Madeleine L’Engle died yesterday at the age of 89.
How can I even begin to describe the impact that L’Engle had on readers? Or on me?
She wrote some of everything: novels, nonfiction, poems, plays. She wrote for everyone:
young children, tweeners, young adults, adults. She wrote in a variety of genres: autobiography, coming-of-age, contemporary fiction, science fiction, [...]
Posted in Adventure, Author obituary, Barry's Picks, Characters, Children's, Coming of Age, Fantasy, Language Focus, Young Adult on May 19, 2007 | No Comments »
When a favorite author dies, your reading life changes. You lose the sense of expectation that comes with waiting for each new title, and your literary world is diminished by their absence. On May 17, 2007, the world lost one of its finest writers of fantasy for children and young adults, Lloyd Alexander.
Alexander was one [...]
Posted in Andrew's Picks, Author obituary, Characters, Clever dialogue, Fantasy, Fast-paced, Humor, Language Focus, Literary fiction, Mainstream fiction, Memoir, Quirky characters, Science fiction on April 12, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.
The author of – what? – literary science fiction? relationship stories? satire? social criticism? – died April 11 at the age of 84. His best known work, Slaughterhouse-5: or The Children’s Crusade assaulted the stupidity of war while recognizing that war is a human constant; it also played with [...]
 | leftoverkumquats on Coupling |
 | t.gal on Angus, Thongs, and Full-Fronta… |
| t.gal on Angus, Thongs, and Full-Fronta… |
 | jan on The Lymond Chronicles, by Doro… |
 | ruhama on Rose: My Life in Service, by R… |
