period piece

The Name of the Rose

01.31.2010 books

So I’m starting early this year with what I’m going to classify as literature. And yeah, it felt like lit. This was a long, slow read for me but it was rewarding when it was over; not so much because it was exciting or dramatic, but because I feel like I learned a few things. [...]

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World Without End

12.27.2009 books

This is the follow-up to Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, which I read about two years ago. It takes place about 200 years after Pillars so I don’t think it deserves to be termed a sequel. You certainly don’t need to read the first one before this one. But they are similar and the [...]

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The Given Day

04.24.2009 books

Reading huge, epic novels has always been complicated for me. The best time to read them is on vacation, but hauling a huge book through airports and rental cars, along with other reading, is cumbersome. But not anymore now that I have a Kindle. I was out of town getting some R&R and the cumbersome [...]

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A Spectacle of Corruption

02.20.2009 books

This is the sequel to A Conspiracy of Paper, which I read a few years ago. I said then, and I’ll say it again, I will continue reading Liss. But I didn’t think it would be three years. This book continues the adventures of Benjamin Weaver, a private detective in 18th Century London. Ahh, I [...]

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The Pillars of the Earth

03.16.2008 books

I cleared the decks for this thing. One book, about 1,000 pages – complete focus. I’ve had good experiences with Ken Follett. Triple was one of the earliest thrillers that I recall reading. I read it back in the mid 1980′s and enjoyed it, then I read it again about five years ago. I didn’t [...]

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Where Angels Fear to Tread

04.21.2007 books

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been consuming a lot of popular fiction so far this year. For balance, I grabbed some literature before heading out on vacation. This E.M. Forster fellow spins a good yarn and it made for some great vacation reading. Forster wrote Howard’s End, which I didn’t read, but I saw [...]

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The Power and the Glory

10.08.2006 books

This is the story of an unnamed priest. He is a tortured soul only referred to as the “whisky priest.” We learn about why he is called such as he is reflecting: He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped [...]

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Washington Square

04.07.2006 books

I’ve had this book sitting in a stack of stuff to read for years now. I think I purchased it about three years ago, probably after seeing one of those Merchant/Ivory movies or something. I’ve never read anything by Henry James but I always see his novels in the racks of classic lit at the [...]

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A Conspiracy of Paper

01.31.2006 books

I’ve had David Liss on my reading list for a long time. I’m not sure how I heard about him. I think maybe there was a write-up in the Chicago Tribune book section, or maybe even Newsweek. Who knows, but I finally pulled the trigger. This came with a lot of deliberation, but it was [...]

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