Gen Lit
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2012 Outlander Series Reading Challenge, Sign up now!
It’s that time of year again Sassenachs! Time to sign up for the Outlander Reading Challenge 2012! This is the time of year where all my fellow readers begin looking for new year reading challenges and book clubs and unlike last year, I am getting an early start and spreading the word about the Outlander Series Reading Challenge that I am hosting again this year. This is the second annual Outlander Series Reading Challenge, last year was my first year hosting the challenge and after great success I decided to host it again this year! I will be changing the format slightly from last years style. Last year I just read…
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Review: The Caldecott Chronicles No.1 by R.G. Bullet (Short Story)
Sweet succulent brains, that is what the undead are looking for in The Caldecott Chronicles by RG Bullet. Though the word ‘zombie’ is never used in the short story it is clear, the 32nd Earl of Rothshire and his home are under siege…from the undead….the zombies are coming! BRAINS! Since this is more of a short story, my review will not be as lengthy. The author was kind enough to give me an ARC of the short story, since he knows I am a huge Victorian/Gothic lit fan. I was really excited to start reading it when my e-copy of the story arrived. This is only the first installment and I…
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Review: Murder at Mansfield Park by Lynne Shepherd
Hold on to your bonnets, there’s been a Murder at Mansfield Park! In this charming Jane Austen spin off, author Lynne Shepherd takes a classic English novel and turns it into a classic ‘who done it’. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the only Austen novel I have not read ironically, for some reason it just never appealed to me. Everyone says that Fanny Price is the worse Austen heroine ever, though I cannot claim my own opinion of the original Fanny Price, I can say with confidence I didn’t care for the Shepherd version of Price in this book which was the obvious point of her novel. I’ve only read a…
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Review: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Facts. What are the simple facts of a story? How much background, story, context, and fact does one need when assessing a mystery? Imagine for a minute that you are a jury or perhaps an investigator of a mystery, what facts would you want? What are important? What would influence your decision? That’s what happens in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins…we get the facts of a case presented to us from various sources and we must assess the facts and piece the story together through intricate statements/narratives by the main characters. When I first started The Woman in White, I had my doubts. I was worried that the…
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Review: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (The Mary Russell #1) by Laurie R. King
I desperately needed something fun and easy to read….and this time of year I just love a good mystery….something about the turning leaves and the cool, slightly foggy mornings….geese flying south for the winter, the pumpkins ripening….I just love fall and always associate mysteries as the season’s preferred genre….maybe it’s the spirit Halloween (incidentally that is my fav holiday as well)! I just finished reading The September Society by Charles Finch and was hungry for another mystery but was waiting for my mom to give me back my copy of the next book in the series (The Fleet Street Murders) that I plan on reading next. So I was stuck…
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Review: The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries #2) by Charles Finch
How perfect and fitting that I am finishing this book today on the first day of September! I’ve just come off a string of long and content heavy books. So I just mentally needed a break from reading things that were hard/complicated, wordy, and had long, extensive family trees (which is so typical of English literary classics and British based books like Outlander or Through a Glass Darkly!). So, I was eager to read something else historically based but yet something I also knew to be a little less complicated and easy to read/understand….I immediately turned to the next book in the Charles Lenox Series, The September Society by Charles…
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Review: Through a Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen
For my birthday a few months ago, my sister got me this book. Both her and I have very similar literary tastes so when she got me this book I was very excited to start reading it–I totally trust her literary judgement, since she is a librarian she knows all the good books/authors :). She had heard lots of good things about it and said she thought it was part of a series but wasn’t sure. She knew the author had written other historic works such as Before Versailles: A Novel of Louis XIV which I saw featured on Goodreads around the same time. Karleen Koen has written four books, Dark Angles,…
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Review: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Well it’s taken me a few months but I have finally finished Great Expectations! Yes I know I started it like months ago and have been slowly trying to finish it up between the move and other books I’ve been reading. I started reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens for the Gothic Literature Reading Challenge, I had it down to read for the Victorian Literature Reading Challenge also but I decided to use it for the Gothic one since it had a lot of classic Gothic themes which I love. I have struggled with reading Dickens over the years only because I think he is wordy and often his stories…
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Review: The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks
I think I must be the only girl on earth who hasn’t seen The Notebook. I am just not into Nicholas Sparks, and I had no interest in watching The Notebook let alone reading a Nicholas Sparks novel. However, at the behest of one of my friends, I decided to cave and read ONE Sparks novel. I picked The Wedding. Now, in general I too fancy myself a jaded cynic so Nicholas Sparks has never really had any appeal to me what-so-ever….he seems a little too over the top sappy. Romance as a genre in general has never been one that I am particularly into though I do like Para-Romance books…
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Review: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
I decided to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as part of the Victorian Literature Challenge. I have read Heart of Darkness before for a Comparative/Literary Criticism class in college. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for it much then and I didn’t care for it reading it again two years later. Though I hoped that not having to write a paper on the book and not having to deconstruct the entire concepts would help me be able to get into it more but I was sadly disappointed. Conrad’s novel is an interesting specimen in literature, it is more of a transitional book that has a foot in the Victorian era but…