Isabel Allende – ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’, Ballantine Books, 2020 The first Allende book I read was ‘Daughter of Fortune’ and it left me with great admiration of the South American born author. After reading the ‘Daughter’ I followed up with its sequel ‘Portrait in Sepia’ and then went on to read ‘Island …
Category: Books
Four Fun Children’s Books
One of the things I believe about children's books is that best of them appeal not only to the younger set, but those who are only young at heart. If you've got younger children or grandchildren and are looking for something to read to or with them, it's often difficult to sort through the thousands …
Alcott’s Little Women
If longevity in print were the only criteria for a book to achieve status as a ‘classic’, Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’, continuously in print since its publication 1868/69, just three years after the conclusion of the American Civil War, would certainly be a contender. Indeed, many consider the work to be a great classic …
Where to Buy Books Safely in a Pandemic
Buying books is a lot more complicated than it was back in the days when you went to your local bookstore to buy, browse or order what they didn’t have in stock. If, like me, you’ve been around since just after the dinosaurs took a powder, you’ll have noticed a number of differences over the …
Collecting Roald Dahl – Pictures Pt. 2
If you avoided the last blog, this is yet another you should skip. I'm continuing with pictures of magazine covers where the first publications of Dahl's articles or short stories are to be found/collected. This is actually proving to be more difficult that I first imagined. I discovered that a number of my photos, taken …
A Book Contest – Evaluating the Evaluation
I’m sure most of us have the experience of writing a government-sponsored exam. It may not be one of our favorite memories. However, not many of us have experience in marking any of these dreaded exams. Over my thirty plus years of teaching, I had several opportunities to work on marking teams for provincial writing …
A Book Contest, Prizes and Reviews – Part Two
In my last blog I outlined the BookLife Prize for authors with unpublished/self-published books. If you need the criteria for the contest, it’s in my last blog, where I mentioned entering all three of my novels for evaluation: ‘The Odin Incident’, ‘Punto’ and ‘Punto and Me’ (all these novels have excerpts in earlier blogs if …
Continue reading A Book Contest, Prizes and Reviews – Part Two
A Book Contest, Prizes and Reviews – Part One
Some of you will no doubt have encountered Publishers’ Weekly (PW), a company that devotes itself to the book publishing industry. If you’re a collector of first edition modern literature, you may have checked out their list of ‘Best selling books in America’, or the ‘Best selling children’s books in America’ that tracks sales of …
Continue reading A Book Contest, Prizes and Reviews – Part One
Roald Dahl – A Guide To Collecting his First Editions
In my earliest years of teaching, I found myself in a local bookstore looking for something to read to my class of ten year olds. I came across a new publication entitled ‘The Twits’ by the English author Roald Dahl. Like many books for the young, it was possible to read right in the store …
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Sense and Sensibility
The minute my DDD (dearest darling daughter) sees me waxing about Jane Austin’s books, she’s likely to run screaming from her computer, muttering darkly. When it comes to merit, Ms. Austin is one of the few authors over whom we have never agreed. However, after spending a few weeks with four contemporary novels, a dip …
