'A local group claimed the books were satanic and promoting witchcraft, and consequently, set about burning a large cache of the books outside the Christ Community Church.' [a 2001 campaign in Mexico against The Lord of the Rings] In two previous articles, I talked about some of the books I enjoyed as a youngster. I …
Tag: libraries
Cloud Cuckoo Land
by Anthony Doerr Like All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr's 2014/2015 Pulitzer winner, Cloud Cuckoo Land comes as a big surprise. It is a book within a book, as compelling as it is original, and tells the story in three timelines - well, four really (which I will explain shortly). Beginning and ending …
“I never read a book before reviewing it.”
Reflections on books, reviews and the Classics Club Literary historians attribute the quotation in my title to Sydney Smith, an English cleric, writer and humorist who lived around the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Known for his many witticisms, Smith, who once described Scotland as the knuckle-end of England, that land of Calvin, …