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A secret hero
Before there was James Bond, before there was John le Carré, there was Baroness Orczy. Paul O’Connor reviews her inventive and rewarding classic. Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. By Baroness Orczy. Barnes & Noble Classics. Softcover. 252 pages. $8.05. It’s 1792, and the Reign of Terror is well under way in Paris. The…
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Just in time for the movie
Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson I’m hearing good things about the new movie version of Far From the Madding Crowd, and I hope to see it sometime. But before seeing a movie adaptation of a classic novel, I wanted to read the novel. Despite having been an English major, I’d never read this book. Fortunately,…
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“A true masterpiece”
Steve Wishnevsky, who knows a lot about the subject, takes a look at a classic collection by one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. Reviewed by Stephen Wishnevsky THE COMPLETE LYONESSE. By Jack Vance. Gollancz. 1,040 pages. Hardcover, 2000. (The trilogy was first published separately in the 1980s.) The late Jack Vance, who…
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Reading Hillerman in Hillerman country
A day in June found me in Tuba City, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation. My husband and son and I were camping in the Four Corners area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. This is Indian country, with large reservations occupying much of the area. Naturally, I thought of Tony Hillerman, who wrote…
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A classic, worth revisiting
Jane Eyre provided good, diverting company for me recently when I made a quick driving trip to and from Morehead City to take my son a few things he needed before his ship deployed to the Mediterranean. By Linda Brinson JANE EYRE. By Charlotte Bronte. Read by Josephine Bailey. Random House Audio. 21 ½hours. 18…
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A tale of today – still
Steve Wishnevsky, who enjoys reading old books on new gadgets, takes a look at another of Mark Twain’s works. By Stephen Wishnevsky THE GILDED AGE: A TALE OF TODAY. By Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Public Domain, 1873 It behooves the historically inclined reader to respect a novel that gave name to a whole…
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Let the debate continue!
Paul O’Connor’s amazing (?) feat of reading Moby-Dick on his iPhone prompted Stephen Wishnevsky of Winston-Salem to write about another classic of American literature, Huckleberry Finn, and to confess to an act of literary heresy. By Stephen Wishnevsky. In the same thread as Paul O’Connor’s review of “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale,” by Herman Melville, I…
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Is this man insane?
Paul O’Connor is special. All those who write for this book blog do so because they love books. They like to read them, and they also like to talk about what they have read. They enjoy the thoughtful conversation about books that’s increasingly moving to the Internet as more and more print publications give up…
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Jack London, The Road
Steve Wishnevsky of Winston-Salem likes to review many kinds of books, including classics that people may not have read but might enjoy. One of the many things to recommend such books is that they are now in the public domain, and if you search for them you might find them where you can download them…