by jillemaclean | Sep 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
A friend gave me a copy of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio several months ago because it’s set in Provence, which I’m visiting this year, and it’s partly about the plague of the mid-1300s, a century that has me hooked. I took over a week to read it. In it, the...
by jillemaclean | Jul 1, 2018 | Book Review
Can art be transformative? At Central Library in Halifax the week of Shakespeare’s birthday (after I’d written the previous Book Talk post on Hamlet), there was a display near the front door of books related to the bard. I picked up Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power...
by jillemaclean | Jun 17, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels
When the HD version of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch came to Halifax, I read the play first (no, I’d never read it, and yes, I’m admitting this on a public forum), then off I went to the movie theatre (this was pre-Covid). But before I went, obeying one of...
by jillemaclean | May 31, 2018 | The Writing Process, Writing Inspiration
How do you counterbalance too much time spent at the computer? I vowed I’d never write a blog at the very last minute, and here I am – with three blogs stashed in Microsoft Word – writing one I want to post tomorrow. I’ve started researching a sequel for the as-yet...
by jillemaclean | May 15, 2018 | Book Review
Do you read book reviews before you read the book or afterwards? I opt for “afterwards.” I want to read the novel, think about it, then check out the reviews to see if I agree with them or if I’ve missed something crucial. I read Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny...
