Richard Powers loves trees and Orhan Pamuk loves Ottoman miniatures, but that doesn’t necessarily make for great fiction.
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Reviews of George Sand’s Indiana and Victor Hugo’s Hernani: two 1830s French works full of melodrama, romanticism, and love quadrangles.
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The Golden Compass was the first book I ever stayed up all night to read so you know I had to read its sequel The Secret Commonwealth as soon as it came out.
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Reviews of the final “Glamourist Histories” by Mary Robinette Kowal, an increasingly ambitious fantasy series with a refreshing perspective on magic.
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I’m developing an app to find linguistic anachronisms in historical fiction & read some Regency romances for important scientific reasons. Nice work if you can get it!
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Glen Berger’s memoir of writing the libretto to the Spider-Man musical is the most page-turning, jaw-dropping, perversely fascinating book I’ve read in ages.
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My traditional round-up of the books and plays that I read in the past year.
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Reviews of the first 3 books in the Parasol Protectorate series. The final 2 are on my reading list for 2019!
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I read only two books in 2018 that I truly disliked, but, oddly, both of them were about women in classic Hollywood.
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After reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I’m an Anne Brontë partisan; so is my friend Samantha Ellis, author of the unconventional Anne biography Take Courage.
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In 2018, I learned to waltz and regularly took afternoon tea; why shouldn’t it also be the year I acquainted myself with Gail Carriger’s steampunk-Victorian fiction?
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