Photo: SH Design via AdobeStock “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding …
Continue reading Stepping through the Looking Glass: A Journey through Speculative Fiction
Photo: FU via Adobe Stock Crime fiction has consistently been one of the most popular genres—in 2014, around one in three novels published in English was a crime novel.[1] What makes this genre so popular? For one, the plot is a puzzle, challenging the reader to guess who done it—which was what first attracted me …
This article was first published in Teacher Plus, May-June 2024 (https://www.teacherplus.org/building-bridges-through-stories/) Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock Stories are an integral part of our lives. They shape us and are the way in which we remember, turning our lives into narratives. As children, we are raised on fables and fairy tales that teach us how to …
Photo: Hillaire via Flickr “Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You …
Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock A decade ago, the first post went up on Talking About Books, announcing its arrival. The first review followed soon after, exactly 10 years ago today.[1] This post is a way of taking stock of the journey and of thanking the people who have been part of it. When I …
Continue reading Looking back at a decade of Talking About Books
Photo: Triff via Shutterstock A young girl runs away to search for the illegitimate child she has had to give up. A boy leaves his family to look for his older brother. A woman tries to build bridges with her estranged son. A man tries to make sense of his younger brother’s death. When I …
Photo: Vipman via Shutterstock This article was inspired by My Life in Middlemarch, a bibliomemoir by Rebecca Mead, which draws on her readings of George Eliot’s Middlemarch over the years. I loved the idea of writing memoirs that are intertwined with a book. But since there isn’t a book I reread regularly, I thought that …
A few years ago, a friend challenged me to post a photograph of my 10 favourite books on this blog. The list took a while to put together, and I finally came up with 15. I’m an inveterate list maker, so I tend to keep running lists in my head of my 10 (or 15 …
As those of you who continue to buy paper books know, there is a point you reach where you run out of space to store them. My husband and I are both holdouts against electronic books. But that comes at a price. Our bookshelves (all 12 of them!) are so packed that there isn’t the …
We finally held our reading event at the ICV Arcade last Wednesday (19 November)—on the one day that the Geneva public transport system decided to go on strike! I was worried that people wouldn’t come, what with no buses or trams running, and traffic jams because more people were taking their cars. But we had …
Continue reading One World, Many Stories: Sharing Books from the Challenge
Talking About Books 