Books, bread and butter, mashed potato one finishes what’s on one’s plate. With all his characteristic light-heartedness, Bennett brings the monarch to life in a way all readers can understand whether they’re royalists or not, because he does it through the love of reading itself. Other words.A book is a device to ignite the imagination.As someone who finds it hard not to finish a book, I was in sympathy with the Queen’s view, Once I start a book I finish it. What isn’t so long however is this week’s book, “The Uncommon Reader” by Alan Bennett, a novella in which Queen Elizabeth II herself becomes obsessed with books after she happens upon a mobile library outside Buckingham Palace. Long have been the reigns of Britain’s queens and long has been the queue to see Elizabeth II lying in state.
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7/4/2023 0 Comments I claudius 1934Everyone assumed this meant he was also feeble-witted and useless. In general the historical details seem to fit what I was able to glean about him, though obviously the words, thoughts and specific day to day events that Graves attributes to him are fictional.Ĭlaudius was lame, sickly, and a stutterer. I, Claudius, being one of the earliest popular modern historicals, tells the story of the Roman Emperor Claudius, with Claudius as the first-person narrator of his own biography. I find Roman history interesting, like most ancient history, but I have never really studied it, so I don't know how accurate Robert Graves' famous set of novels is. Filled with poisonings, betrayal, and shocking excesses, I Claudius is history that rivals the most exciting contemporary fiction. Lame, stammering Claudius, once a major embarrassment to the imperial family and now emperor of Rome, writes an eyewitness account of the reign of the first four Caesars: the noble Augustus and his cunning wife, Livia the reptilian Tiberius the monstrous Caligula and finally old Claudius himself and his wife, Messalina. Here is one of the best historical novels ever written. 7/4/2023 0 Comments Austenland book reviewI think BBC’s version of Pride and Prejudice instilled a little bit of that longing in all of us. My review of Midnight in Austenland will be posted here in January, so keep your eye out for it!Īustenland is like Disneyland for women who secretly wish they had a Mr. In honor of the February 2012 release of Austenland’s companion novel, Midnight in Austenland (which I’ve already read the Netgalley for!!!), I decided to post this review. And yet the longer she stays, the more her insecurities seem to fall away, and the more she wonders: Is she about to kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. But when a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, Jane's fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become realer than she ever could have imagined.ĭecked out in empire-waist gowns, Jane struggles to master Regency etiquette and flirts with gardeners and gentlemen or maybe even, she suspects, with the actors who are playing them. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is ruining her love life: no real man can compare. Jane Hayes is a seemingly normal young New Yorker, but she has a secret. Also in this series: Midnight in Austenland 7/4/2023 0 Comments Even More Parts by Tedd ArnoldHe has received The Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor for I Spy Fly Guy and has won The Edgar Award for his Young Adult Novel, Rat Life. SKU: CHPB-P333 Categories: Children Books, Children Picture Books Paperback, Used Books. ( Kirkus Reviews)Ībout the Author Tedd Arnold is the author of such children's classics as No Jumping on the Bed! and No More Water in the Tub! He has published more than 50 books as author and illustrator. ( School Library Journal) Young readers.will warm to this neurotic young rhymester. Children will ask for it again and again. Zany, brightly colored illustrations and rhyming verse. Parts By Tedd Arnold// A READ ALOUD ABC Read to ME 12.1K subscribers 633 132K views 4 years ago Parts By Tedd Arnold A READ ALOUD What's a five year old to do when he is falling a part. Just be careful not to laugh your head off! Want to keep your hands attached? Simple-stick them on with gloves and lots of glue. Like, if you want to keep your heart from breaking, just make sure it's well padded and protected by tying a pillow around your chest. what's a kid to do if he wants to keep all his body parts in place? Well, one thing is for sure, he'll have to be creative. About the Book This hilarious companion to the bestselling "Parts" brings back Arnold's neurotic young narrator for another look at the human body and all its parts. 7/4/2023 0 Comments Matt parker 4th dimensionHe was soon striving to make maths fun for the most reluctant of students. The damage had been done”.Īfter a double major in Maths and Physics at the University of Western Australia, Parker trained to be a maths teacher, and moved to the UK in 2005. And even though I then realised that not everyone else was as excited about it, by then it was too late. When I got to school, I already thought maths was brilliant. “He kind of tricked me into it, selling it as a reward and fun. Encouraged by his accountant father he started doing sums at the age of three or four. It appears that Parker-whose début, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension (Particular Books, October) is set to do for maths what Keri Smith did for creativity, according to Penguin-was destined to be a mathematician from the year of his birth in Perth, Western Australia. Very few people ever get to be the exact square root of a year: 1980 is one of the rare years where it works.” And because in the year 2025, I will turn 45. “And why is that?” I enquire, acutely aware of my (scraped) Grade C in O-Level Maths. Ask mathematician Matt Parker what his favourite number is, and you won’t get some namby-pamby random answer like seven or 11 (even if 11 is the only palindromic prime number with an even number of digits). Soon a new story emerges, that stirs up Johanna’s greatest fears, but ultimately leads to the answers she is searching for. In the process of opening closed doors, others in the community reflect back on the town’s history, on their youth, and on the dreams that play in their minds. She sets out to unravel her family history, the identity of her mother, and the dark secrets long buried with her father. It isn’t until Ulla tells her the local lore about the American girl and the tragedy that took place more than thirty years before that Johanna begins to question how her parents fit into the story. She leads a lonely existence that is punctuated by visits to her privileged classmate, Ulla Bäckström, who lives in the nearby luxury gated community. Teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a small house bordering the forest on the outskirts of a remote coastal town in Finland. 7/4/2023 0 Comments West with giraffes bookBehind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California's first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. "Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes." An emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America. In describing The Night in Question, (Alfred A. His works have been published in numerous literary magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Granta, Story, Esquire and Antaeus. In Pharaoh's Army, Wolff's lucid memoir of the Vietnam War, won the Esquire-Volvo-Waterstone Prize for Nonfiction in 1994 and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award. This Boy's Life was made into the 1993 movie of the same name starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo DiCaprio. Earlier this year he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received numerous awards for his work including: the 1985 Pen/Faulkner Award, the Whiting Foundation Award in 1990, and Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award in 1993, among others. Wolff, the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, also is the author of two highly acclaimed memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army. The event is free and open to the public. Wolff, author of such brilliant short story collections as The Night in Question, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and The Barracks Thief, is the latest guest of the 2001 James McConkey Reader in American Fiction series at Cornell. Cornell Auditorium at Cornell University. Master story writer Tobias Wolff will give a public reading Friday, Sept. 7/3/2023 0 Comments The mist of avalon book seriesI was 14 years old when I first read The Mists of Avalon and - still one year away from a sophomore-year English class reading of John Gardner’s Grendel - had never before fully understood the intriguing nature of a legend told from an entirely different point of view. Written by Marion Zimmer Bradley and first published in 1982, it is a clever interpretation of the legend of King Arthur, including the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay. The novel, The Mists of Avalon, became my first purchase with the babysitting money I’d saved. Here was a narrator who embodied all my girlhood fantasies of being queen of the woods behind my home, or a priestess who could harness the power of the wind. Now in truth I have come to be wise-woman, and a time may come when these things may need to be known. In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen. The tome’s paperback cover was intriguing: a white swan a gold-hilted sword held aloft by an enrobed woman a handsome white steed, its hooves obscured in mist. Dalton’s bookstore, I discovered a tome – as thick as the Bible - which granted me access to a world I had theretofore never imagined existed. Once upon a summer in the mid-1980s, while perusing the shelves in a B. PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them. 7/3/2023 0 Comments Jack ewing volkswagenIts executives at first tried to lie their way out of the problem. When they were back out on the road, the cars ran much dirtier than promised. During these inspections, the cars would run more cleanly in a way that wasn’t feasible under normal conditions. This device could tell when the cars were being inspected by recognizing that the inspectors were using a specific regimen of engine tests and were spinning the wheels without moving the car. Starting in the mid-aughts, VW engineers put a special device in their American diesel cars. |