by Brenda W. Clough For professional reasons I find myself these days contemplating a huge TBR stack of Victorian triple-decker novels: Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell. This is intimidating; one cannot speed through these things. But where eyesight and time fail, technology … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Reviews
by Brenda W. Clough There is a song format, ‘call and response’. You hear it most often in gospel or religious music, when the singers almost converse, exhorting or admonishing each other verse by verse or line by line. Well, … Continue reading
Reading/Seeing (#3) When somebody asks me, “Who are your favorite sf and fantasy authors?” I duck and mumble. Any answer I can make will be incomplete, invidious, and insignificant. If it’s guidance they want, I’m no expert. I never was … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith There are several books whose history, or influence, I think are more interesting than the actual book. (One of these I am in the process of reading. It is actually so boring that it keeps putting me … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith I was barely thirteen when I first read Mary Stewart’s Madam Will You Talk. It set the bar high for romantic suspense for me—and all these years later, it still works. It’s got what for me is … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith For me, what better way to start off a fresh year than by talking about feel good things? In this case, books. There is a new Hilary McKay coming out in March for USAn readers. I have … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith Verisimilitude—authenticity—authority. Plausibility and credibility. Truth. … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith I recently reread The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, leading me to a question. Without any academic snarkiness, Glyer thoroughly dismantles Humphrey Carpenter’s assurance in his … Continue reading
by Sherwood Smith Cross-time, time-splitting and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. “Alternate History” extrapolates “what if” sometimes from pivotal points in history, and sometimes from … Continue reading
When I first finished Jo Walton’s to Among Others, there was this instinctive pang of hurt at being left out because when I met Walton in Tempe for World Fantasy a few years back, she didn’t tell me about the … Continue reading