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Playing With Time: The Essex Serpent, Reality is Not What it Seems & Arcadia

Playing With Time: The Essex Serpent, Reality is Not What it Seems & Arcadia

by jillemaclean | Nov 30, 2018 | book review, Books Other Than Novels, Novels I’ve Read

Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently? In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction,...
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry Almost Wrecked Me

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry Almost Wrecked Me

by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | book review, Novels I’ve Read

If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
Here’s a Novel That Stirred Me Up. What More Can We Ask of Any Book?

Here’s a Novel That Stirred Me Up. What More Can We Ask of Any Book?

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...
Indian Horse: A Much-Needed Book For a Time of Truth And Reconciliation

Indian Horse: A Much-Needed Book For a Time of Truth And Reconciliation

by jillemaclean | Apr 30, 2018 | book review, Novels I’ve Read

Richard Wagamese was an Ojibway writer from northern Ontario, from the Wabaseemoong First Nation, who died in 2017. I read his novel “Indian Horse” over several days. Not a book to be rushed, because of the beauty of its prose and its harrowing story. The first few...
Books That Demand to be Read

Books That Demand to be Read

by jillemaclean | Apr 16, 2018 | Novels I’ve Read, writing inspiration

Does a book you’ve owned for a while suddenly leap off the shelf and demand to be read? Helen Humphrey’s The Lost Garden, published in 2002, was such a book for me last week. I read it over an evening and the next morning. In prose both subtle and sure of itself, she...
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  • Days Without End by Sebastian Barry Almost Wrecked Me
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