A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

If you've read this blog for a while now, you know that John Sandford's Virgil Flowers series is one of the series that I read.   Deadline is the eighth installment in this series.  I've read and reviewed all the previous installments on this blog.  You can click here to read the review for the previous installment in the series.  I've been doing some thinking about some of these story lines and the crimes that Virgil Flowers' has investigated over the course of the series, and some have been a little absurd and ridiculous (and in some cases, Virgil has even agreed with me!  See the review for Storm Front , the book right before Deadline ).  I'm thinking about the one in which he goes up against some Vietnamese spies/assassins that come to Minnesota to rain down some vengeance stemming from a forty or fifty year old massacre that happened half a world away and the last one in which a Da Vinci Code -esque Biblical archaeological artifact heist is at the cente

I'm not sure how I ran across this mini-series.  I think I was looking at something on Amazon, and this was one of the recommended titles or something like that.  I thought it would be something a little different from the usual English period dramas that I watch.  With the centennial of the beginning of the first World War, there are several mini series and such that have been released--most are Australian or British productions.  Hollywood tends to focus more on World War II (there are always World War II movies coming out every year... hardly any about World War I with the recent exception of Spielberg's War Horse ).  There is also the upcoming mini-series  The Crimson Field which will air this summer on PBS about a British nurse (I think) serving in a military hospital in France during World War I.  It's based on a true story.  As it happens Anzac Girls is also based on a true story originally told by Peter Rees in his book, The Other ANZACS .  I haven't read th

It's been a long, long time since I've read a graphic novel.  I found this one when I was perusing Amazon.  You know how that goes: you go on there to look up one book and then the next thing you know, it's two hours later,  you've got a long list of interesting titles you want to read and you've forgotten why you went on there in the first place.  Or maybe that only happens to me. Through The Woods is a graphic novel.  Carroll is a graphic artist who publishes many short comics via her website and in other print anthologies.  She lives in Canada.  I like to read a graphic novel every once in a while, and this one seemed right up my alley because the stories looked spooky. This is a collection of several tales told in the graphic novel/comic format--all of them twisted, all creepy, with endings bleak and dark as the tales themselves.  These are tales of monsters and murder, of things that hide in the dark of the shadows and the night.  The drawings are both s

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Lives In Ruins is Marilyn Johnson's third book.  It was initially the book that first caught my interest, but since my library had a copy of This Book Is Overdue , I read that one first.  Then we got a copy of The Dead Beat , which I also read.  In the hierarchy of Marilyn Johnson books, Lives In Ruins is at the top with This Book Is Overdue , and The Dead Beat is at the bottom.  For some reason, The Dead Beat just never caught fire for me like the other two did.  In Lives In Ruins (I love the title!), Johnson turns her sights on the field of archaeology and the passionate professionals who work in it.  It is a field about which you have to be passionate to work in it because it is not an easy life, you will never have career stability, and you won't get rich working as an archaeologist (far from it in fact). The book begins at the beginning: at field school where archaeology students go for practical experience in the field on an actual dig.  Johnson also explores the