Let me start right out with a confession - I tried to read Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert’s much admired memoir, but I never finished it. I have rarely disliked a book more than I disliked that one. I found the writing mawkish, the author annoying and her problems silly.

However, I was reading nothing but good reviews for The Signature of All Things ( Read more... )

An historical novel using real people (for the most part) as protagonists, and very well done. In the mid-1860s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was working on the first, full-length, English translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy for American readers. Because this was a huge job of work, he enlisted his friends and fellow Dante scholars Oliver ( Read more... )