Category: Books

Books, TBR Challenge

Cora’s TBR Challenge Check-In

Cora Lee

We’re a quarter of the way through the year, fellow readers. Are you at least 25% of the way through your TBR Challenge?

I am, though April has been another slow reading month for me. Happily, it’s not because of migraine troubles. I’ve actually been writing a lot more lately, and I don’t tend to read as much when I’m on a writing binge. If I do read during a writing stint, I try to stay away from the time period I’m writing so I don’t inadvertently borrow from someone else’s work (research is one thing, but plagiarism is quite another!). Right now I’m working my way through Edith Pargeter’s The Bloody Field, and enjoying it enormously. When I’m finished, I think I might go back and do Shakespeare’s Henry V again. 🙂

The Bloody FieldIt’s not too late to join in the reading fun! Check out this year’s TBR Challenge page for more details.

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: Book Sale Finder

Cora Lee

BSFlogo1001

Our Favorite this week is a doozie, especially if you love used book sales. The website Book Sale Finder aggregates information about used book sales (mostly by Friends of the Library organizations) all over the US and Canada and gives you the low down: dates and times, locations, how many books, approximate range of prices, and anything else they know. If you want to enter your information, they’ll even send you an e-mail before book sales in your area.

Happy book buying!

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: British Library iPad App

Cora Lee

This week’s Favorite combines history with technology: meet the British Library’s 19th Century Historical Collection iPad App!

19ctitlepg_ipadrh

From the website:

What’s in it?

  • Over 60,000 historical books
  • Curated books and collections including Libri Italini, Iceland Country of Honour exhibit with the Frankfurt Book Fair, High Seas Adventures and many other interesting works with multi-media content from our curators
  • Commentary on selected titles
  • Images of original maps
  • Author inscriptions and margin notes
  • Classics in foreign languages such as Italian, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch

There is a one-time fee of $89.99 for non-UK users or £49 within the UK to access all 60,000 books. But the app itself is free and comes with access to about 100 books without paying the fee.

Books, TBR Challenge

Cora’s TBR Challenge Check-In

Cora Lee

March is coming to an end, my fellow readers–how is your TBR Challenge progressing?

This has been a tough month for me. I left my teaching career behind and have gone Emma 2009into business for myself as a copy editor. Leaving the classroom was an immense relief, and I don’t regret it for a minute. But self-employment is scary, especially since I’m just beginning to build a client base. March has also been a month of changing weather, so it’s migraine season once again for me. Combine those two things, and you get little reading time for Cora.

On the bright side, my To Be Watched lists have begun to shrink. While reading and hollow-crownclose work have been difficult with migraine symptoms, watching historical movies and TV shows has been a nice way to pass the time (a bigger screen, farther away is less work for my eyes, and much more comfortable to my poor head). My favorite so far? A toss up between the 2009 adaptation of Emma with Jonny Lee Miller and Romola Garai, and The Hollow Crown series with Jeremy Irons as Henry IV and Tom Hiddleston as Henry V.

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorites: Richard Armitage Reads Classic Love Poems

Cora Lee

Classic Love Poems

Our Favorite this week is 22 minutes of bliss. Richard Armitage has brought his beautiful voice to the audiobook world once again in Classic Love Poems, including work by Regency favorites Keats, Byron, and Shelley. You can find this collection on Audible in the US and UK.

Here’s the full list of poems:

  • “How do I love thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare
  • “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “To Be One with Each Other” by George Eliot
  • “Maud” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  • “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell
  • “Bright Star” by John Keats
  • “Love’s Philosophy” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
  • “Meeting at Night” by Robert Browning
  • “The Dream” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe
  • “I carry your heart” by e. e. cummings
  • “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
  • “Give All to Love” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: Tennant and Cumberbatch in Mansfield Park

Cora Lee

Mansfield ParkThey’re back!

Last May, BBC Radio 4 re-aired a radio play of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in celebration of the novel’s 200th birthday. The cast included David Tennant as Tom, Benedict Cumberbatch as Edmund, and Felicity Jones as Fanny Price.

And now you can have a copy of your very own 🙂

Amazon UK has the CD in stock, while Amazon.com has a US release date of March 1. Can’t wait on the American side of the Pond? Audible also has it as a digital download, available now.

 

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: Regency Turns 80

Cora Lee

Our Favorite this week is a celebration! Eighty years ago Georgette Heyer published her first Regency romance novel, and The Beau Monde is commemorating the anniversary with a series of articles. Pieces for Regency Buck (written by Alina K. Field) and An Infamous Army (by Shannon Donnelly) are already posted, with more to come throughout the year for each of Heyer’s Regency romances and some of her non-Regency historicals. Check them out and sigh over your favorites, find new-to-you gems to read…or remind yourself which titles are already on your TBR list 😉

Regency-Turns-80-200x200

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: P&P Supreme Court Citation

Cora Lee

Our Favorite this week is a bit of an odd duck. Whoever thought that the United States Supreme Court would be citing Pride and Prejudice in one of its decisions? Well, on January 13, 2015 it did.

It was a case where a bank robber fleeing from the scene broke into a woman’s home and “guided a terrified Parnell from a hallway to a room a few feet away, where she suffered a fatal heart attack.” This bank robber (Whitfield) was convicted of (among other things) forcing the woman to accompany him–which increased the penalties he’d face. He was appealing based on the definition of the word “accompaniment”, which is used in the statute he was convicted of violating.

PrideAndPrejudiceTitlePage

This is (in part) what the Court decided:

In 1934, just as today, to “accompany” someone meant to “go with” him. See Oxford English Dictionary 60 (1st ed. 1933) (defining “accompany” as: “To go in company with, to go along with”). The word does not, as Whitfield contends, connote movement over a substantial distance. It was, and still is, perfectly natural to speak of accompanying someone over a relatively short distance, for example: from one area within a bank “to the vault”; “to the altar” at a wedding; “up the stairway”; or into, out of, or across a room. English literature is replete with examples. See, e.g., C. Dickens, David Copperfield 529 (Modern Library ed. 2000) (Uriah “accompanied me into Mr. Wickfield’s room”); J. Austen, Pride and Prejudice 182 (Greenwich ed. 1982) (Elizabeth “accompanied her out of the room”).

Interesting, isn’t it? 😀

You can check out the full text of the decision here.

Books, Friday Favorites

Friday Favorite: Frankenstein

Cora Lee

First published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been adapted and re-adapted dozens of times. And this week’s favorite is the newest–an audiobook dramatization featuring Arthur Darvill as Victor Frankenstein and Nicholas Briggs as Frankenstein’s Creature. It’s available as a download or a collection of CDs at the Big Finish website for both US and UK listeners (I’m not sure about other countries–if you try it, let me know).

Check out the trailer:

Books, TBR Challenge

Cora’s TBR Challenge 2015

Cora Lee

Job_Lot_Cheap_by_William_Michael_Harnett,_1878_(cropped)

In the immortal words of John Lennon, “another year over and a new one just begun”. It’s time (if you haven’t already) to make those resolutions for 2015–including one for your TBR pile.

My TBR Challenge was such a personal success last year that I’m doing it again! 2015 is very uncertain for me–my teaching career is up in the air right now (Will I ever teach again? When? Where? How? If not, what else will I do?), and thus so is my writing time (How much energy will I have to devote to a day job? How will my health hold up? The bills have to be paid, but will I be too tired to do anything else?). So this year’s TBR Challenge is a way for me to take a measure of control in addition to finally reading some of the books languishing on my shelves and Kindle.

I’ve tweaked the rules slightly for this year:

1. How many books from your TBR pile will you read? I’m upping my goal to 18 books this year over the 12 I chose for last year. I have so many books floating around the house that 12 felt like just a drop in the bucket, and I’m hoping to make more headway this time around.

2. How long have your books been waiting? For the purposes of this challenge, the books I read must have been acquired by me or placed on my library TBR list (which is also getting out of hand) before August 1, 2014. This means I can’t buy new books in January and count them toward my TBR Challenge come September–which I found myself doing at least once last year, and kind of defeats the purpose of the challenge.

3. How will you hold yourself accountable? Like last year, I’ll post here once a month to share my progress and see how you all are doing. I found the Goodreads shelf and the dedicated page on this blog were enormously helpful, too. I’m a very visual person and being able to see the collection of books that I’d read gave me a nice sense of accomplishment, which made me want to read more TBR books 🙂

Who will take up this challenge with me? Who will commit to wading through the mountains of books you’ve spent your hard-earned money on, but never read? Leave a comment here or on the 2015 TBR Challenge page with your goal: how many books will you tackle this year?