Just read a beautiful story called Egil's saga. This is Christine Fells's translation from 1974 (I think there's a more popular, more recent translation published by Penguin that I will try). It took me a couple of weeks to read it, and it's short. Reason being it's hard to keep up with all the Thorolfs and Thorgerds and Thordises). Of course, this ( Read more... )

This lovely book brought back too many memories, stuff I hadn't thought about in DECADES. Hey wow, I can actually remember back for DECADES now, I didn't realize that. The story is about an orphan in Prince Edward Island around 1900 who gets adopted into country life. She also has a HUGE imagination and romantic outlook, to a fault (such as ( Read more... )

After reading that article on first lines in science fiction, I finally felt the need to read another actual book!

Vigilant is another book in the "League of Peoples" universe, of which Expendable was the first book. It's actually the third book, but I skipped Commitment Hour because it wasn't interesting enough -- well, the idea of changing and ( Read more... )

Another novel by Amalie Skram, published 1892. This book is about the familiar theme of an innocent girl marrying an older guy and becomes disillusioned with marriage and life. But it's also very different from Constance RingThe beginning of the book concerns the wedding night of the main character Aurora (Ory) and her new husband Mr. Riber. Until ( Read more... )

"Both Amalie Skram in Norway and Victoria Benedictsson in Sweden published novels in 1885 about the marriages they had experienced. In their novels, Skram's Constance Ring and Benedictsson's Pengar (Money), they exposed the sexual inexperience of a young bride married off to a much older man, her economic dependency on him, and the hypocrisy of the ( Read more... )

This collection of stories was translated by Jennifer Draskau and give a nice glimpse into the lives and thoughts of people in Thailand. Subjects include marriage; gender roles; caring for children; a Chinese abuse victim who cannot understand a life without violence; "one good turn deserves another"; urbanization of rural areas; danger (such as ( Read more... )

This is a 1910 book by Colette. It's the type of book I couldn't put down, but I did put it down twenty times throughout the day, to digest it. It's not actually very complicated, but it has nice, rather flowery, descriptive language, a nice sensual read ( Read more... )

That being the title of the 1940 book by Raymond Chandler I just read.

I was cataloging a book about the movie The Big Lebowski, and some of the book talked about the movie's similarity to the novels by Chandler, or rather, the Dude's disimilarity to Philip Marlowe. I then had a sudden urge to read about a hardboiled detective in 1940s Los Angeles ( Read more... )

The Butcher's Wife is a 1983 book by Taiwanese author Li Ang. She got the idea from a Shanghai news report about a woman who killed her husband. Normally all such women are assumed to have a man on the side, as there is no other reason she could possibly kill her husband; however, this woman was not having an affair, there was no evidence she was, ( Read more... )

Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore is a collection of short stories by Catherine Lim, published in 1978. Lim is Singaporean but grew up in Malaysia ( Read more... )