Hot stuff
Robin McKinley’s Dragonhaven is set in Smokehill National Park somewhere out west, where the major draw is a population of Draco australiensis – Let’s stop there. I love this novel about a national park with dragons, which is also a meditation on parenting, communication, and memory. The premise alone was enough to sell me on … Read more
Historical fiction, with cyborgs
As a historian, I’m a sucker for time travel novels. To go back in time and observe is a historian’s dream. (We’ll never know, though, even if we were there, exactly what people were thinking and feeling at any given time in history. People are unfathomable. Some things will always be guesses.) In some time … Read more
Will the real Patrick Ashby please stand up?
In the opening pages of Josephine Tey’s classic mystery novel Brat Farrar (1950), a young man decides to commit a crime. The crime is impersonation and the motive is money, of course. The young man, the eponymous Brat (a derivation of “Bart”), looks almost exactly like Patrick Ashby, who had disappeared, believed a suicide, eight … Read more
Reread quest
The book you reread is different from the book you read the time before. You change. Your reading strategies change. The book expands to fill more of your life. I’ve been writing about books I love, that I reread because I love both the experience of reading them and the experience of having read them … Read more
The exiles return
Melina Marchetta is an Australian writer well known for her YA novels set in Catholic high schools (the wonderful Saving Francesca is a frequent reread.) She also won the Printz, a high honor for YA books, for Jellicoe Road, a book I found so sad that I haven’t ever picked it up for a second … Read more
Return to Edgewood
When I was growing up, my dad spoke fondly about the time in his life when he reread his favorite book, Crime and Punishment, once a year. “On an exceptionally hot evening in July,” he would quote in a funny voice, imitating a friend who didn’t get his love for the book, “a young man … Read more
TECT Knows Best
Once you’ve failed at everything, what next? **COURANE, Sandor: You are to be sent as a colonist to the agricultural world of Epsilon Eridani, Planet D. You will be part of an integrated farming community. Your future successes and failures will thus be of no consequence to the community at large here on Earth, yet … Read more
Eva Ibbotson on love and war
Eva Ibbotson’s characters are haunted by the war. Which war? It depends on which romantic historical novel we’re talking about, but one thing’s for sure: neither her brave heroines nor her strong heroes can ever go back to Vienna. Ibbotson (1925-2010), the beloved and bestselling author of chapter books for children such as Which Witch? … Read more
Walking the bounds
The internet has recently been celebrating the work of fantasy novelist Diana Wynne Jones, who died last year. I spent my childhood reading and rereading her books, which, as British imports, I could never find for sale. I even retyped a significant portion of one of my favorites, Archer’s Goon, so I could have a … Read more
Death, taxes, and telexes
Hilary Tamar, a professor of legal history at Oxford, is devoted to the sacred cause of Scholarship, not to mention Truth. But Hilary (gender unspecified) regularly ditches that high calling to instead investigate and solve crimes in Sarah Caudwell’s four mystery novels about British barristers. I read them all recently and enjoyed the heck out … Read more
