So I was flipping through The Encyclopedia of Fantasy in preparation for teaching an upcoming instruction session (for a class with fantasy fiction on the syllabus), and came across an entry on "Opera." A really long entry, consisting of a 20-page-long list of operas "based on myths, legends, folktales and so on or that contain […]
I finished it! It had its plot and pacing flaws, but when the action shifted back to Hogwarts, I was more than willing to forgive them. Interesting conversation going on at Easily Distracted, too — but don’t read it if you haven’t read the book yet. Spoilery reflections follow in the comments:
Signs that we’re only a few days from the release of the new Harry Potter book, # 358: You walk into a university library (Drexel’s, to be exact) and find the place draped with streamers in various Hogwarts house colors, and signs that say things like "Hermione’s nook" and "Voldemort Cave." I’ll admit to rolling […]
… is one of these reading chairs with built-in bookshelves. (Via Librarian Avengers.) Just kidding. I don’t actually have space for a big armchair (or even the narrower rocking chair) in my current apartment. A girl can always dream, though, can’t she?
And, while I’m on a roll: Happy Children’s Books Week! I read so many books as a kid that it’s sometimes hard to remember which ones I liked best. But my favorite author was Joan Aiken, who wrote a whole series of novels set in a kind of alternate-history England in the 18th century. Years […]
Several nights ago, over dinner, a friend who reads this blog (hi, Christa!) posed the following question: How many of Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted into operas? Off the top of our heads, we came up with five: Verdi’s Otello, Macbeth, and Falstaff; Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette; and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A quick […]
In honor of Banned Books Week, I made a little LibraryThing widget to display banned books from my own collection: I used Wikipedia’s list of banned and challenged books as a quick reference. Looking over the list, I recognized quite a few books I loved when I was growing up. It made me wonder if […]
Happy Bloomsday! This time next year I want to go to the Joyce readings at the Rosenbach Museum. Or, at the very least, the ceremonial pre-Bloomsday pub crawl.
I’m seeing the American Book Review’s list of the greatest fictional first lines linked everywhere (it keeps popping up in my del.icio.us inbox and all over the blogosphere). I suppose 1 and 2 were the inevitable choices for the 1 and 2 spots. But I was happiest to see numbers 30, 37, 79, 82, 87, […]
In my current stack of things to read / finish reading / start reading / dip into and sample: Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, an excerpt from which I came across and blogged about last year; Cole Swensen’s new book of poems, The Book of a Hundred Hands (any poet […]