As some of you might know, silburygirl is a serious Austen scholar; she's doing a paper on Mansfield Park and urged me to reread it when I told her it was the one Austen novel I loathed and gave me instructions on what to look for. I did and posted a review on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Sil urged me to post the review on LJ, because she wants to see what ( Read more... )

I've been reading off this list from The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Ultimate Reading List. I just finished the The Horror list. Thirteen of the 44 below are vampire novels. Go figure... I'd tried at least half of these before--but then many of the below fit other genres from thrillers with no element of the supernatural (Jaws, Silence of the ( Read more... )

I've been reading off this list from The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Ultimate Reading List and did posts on the The Romance List and the Fantasy List. I now just polished off the Literary Fiction List so thought I'd post on those ( Read more... )

I've been reading off this list from The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Ultimate Reading List and did a post on the Romance List--which is my least favorite genre. Now I just finished the list of my favorite genre, the Fantasy List. Naturally I'd read a lot more of these to begin with and I liked a lot more. I tried to rate the below on something of ( Read more... )

I've been reading off this list from The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Ultimate Reading List--specifically the Fantasy List and the Literary Fiction List. I was finding I enjoyed the recommended books so much, I decided to tackle the Romance List, since I've never had much success with that genre.

My impression honestly is almost all much of the ( Read more... )

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I'm not a fan of the romance aisle, so it took a while before I realized that a lot of what disturbed and annoyed me in SSHG fanfic came from that genre. It's not that I don't like love stories, but I prefer romance embedded in suspense, mystery, literary and historic fiction, science-fiction, fantasy. I prefer my heroines able, brainy and not ( Read more... )

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I just finished reading JK Rowling's Beadle the Bard (translated we're told by Hermione Granger) It consists of five tales with commentary by Albus Dumbledore that gives little tidbits about wizarding society ( Read more... )

I was discussing with silburygirl the works of fantasy we've read and loved, she was wondering what she'd missed out, and that caused me to pull out my (literally) falling apart copy of A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, Searles, Meachem and Franklin, eds (1982) long out of print and thus out of date. Nevertheless, I thought I'd share with you, and her, it's "Seven ( Read more... )