"Food and hot tea lift my spirits." So says Nora Porteous, who has returned to her family home in Australia, a “wretched and slothful old woman”. 1978; Penguin Books, 1984 Well, some might think her so. Wretched. Slothful. Old. At least, she muses that it's possible. But Nora works against
It began when I was a girl, with books like Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs and Norma Fox Mazer's I, Trissy. These stories invited me directly into characters' private thoughts, via letters written to a trusted recipient and journal entries written for the writer's own eyes. Trans. Katharina Bielenberg
My experience with Neil Gaiman is relatively limited: Odd and the Frost Giants and the audio production of The Graveyard Book. Stardust is a very interesting third to add, and all the more so given that I have been reading the version illustrated by Charles Vess. 1997; DC Comics,
It began with an unreasonable number of books. (Doesn't it always?) I thought last year's list would be inspirational, but it hovered in the background, with other titles more insistent, and this year's OUAT reading has been a flurry of all-over-the-place fragments so far. I haven't finished anything yet, but
In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains. Hoping that "readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they
