7/4/2023 0 Comments Bear marian engel reviewWhat she discovers will change her life forever. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. Lou's imagination is soon overtaken by the island's past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Eager to investigate the estate's curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. The winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel's most famous - and most controversial - novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship.
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7/4/2023 0 Comments Fallon november 9There were subtle hints-and I mean subtle-that led to the conclusion of this book. I seriously admire Colleen Hoover for the plot twist she delivered so expertly in this book. You don’t learn anything about the characters between those times until they meet up again, which is obviously one of the things that makes this book so spectacular. One of the things that I’d like to mention is that there are huge time jumps between each November 9. If you love romance novels, this is sure to be one of your favorites. The characters are phenomenal as always and the plot is even better. It is a beautifully written story about finding your confidence, loving yourself, and learning how to forgive. Ugly Love, Confess, and It Ends with Us are at the top of that list, but November 9 just earned its spot in my top favorite CoHo books. Colleen Hoover has delivered many of my favorite romance novels. 7/4/2023 0 Comments Hearts of Ice by Adi RuleThose expecting suspense will be disappointed by the fairly obvious plot twists and low-stakes pacing, but the charming, heartfelt characters, especially Viveca’s witty best friend, Wren, make this a worthwhile read. Viveca’s fixation on her grades at the expense of genuine passion or intrinsic interest, all while pushing away friendships, delivers a nuanced depiction of burnout. Without having proof of her suspicions that odd facts about Jamison don’t add up, she knows no one will believe her-and now she’s becoming unhealthily obsessed with catching Jamison in a lie. She’s also eerily reminded of her past: In seventh grade she suffered a breakdown and made baseless accusations of cheating against another girl. However, Viveca can’t help but compare him to her dad, a pathological liar. Jamison’s hard to hate and quickly wins over all her classmates with his glamorous and exotic stories. After an admissions interview goes south, she decides she needs to be valedictorian in order to secure a spot the only problem is handsome new guy Jamison Sharpe, a recent transfer who’s vying for the top spot. Overachiever Viveca North wants nothing more than to get into Everett College, which her late mother attended as a freshman before becoming pregnant and dying in childbirth. An ambitious high school senior suspects her academic rival isn’t who he says he is. 7/4/2023 0 Comments One of the murphys bookIn 1879 he entered the University of Moscow to study medicine and graduated in 1884. Widely considered one of the world’s greatest writers, Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. Recent TV: Recurring on Station 19, Ray Donovan, Shameless, Netflix’s Unbelievable with Toni Collette and Dustin Black’s miniseries When We Rise. Film: The Way Back with Ben Affleck, The Amateurs with Jeff Bridges. Alving, Ghosts, Bottom & Demetruis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Ruth, Collected Stories. LA: Parfumerie (Wallis Annenberg), The Brothers Karamazov (Circle X – LADCC Award), Lost in Yonkers (La Mirada), Some favorite roles: Mother Courage (Canadian Fringe) Mrs. Representative Regional: The Normal Heart (Pioneer Square), The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Third Rail) Outside Mullingar (B Street), A Doll’s House, When We Were Married (Seattle Rep), Broadway, Oktoberfest (Empty Space), Snow Falling on Cedars, Doubt (Portland Center Stage), A Life with Father (Denver Center), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Hartford Stage), Enchanted April (Cleveland Play House). She moved with Seattle Rep’s The Cider House Rules (Garland Award) to L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and never left. Taini is honored to be back at Pasadena Playhouse where she previously starred in Enchanted April. But, Hollywood cut one character, Hillary. There is no question that these actors played their roles well. Ginnifer Goodwin is Rachel, Kate Hudson is Darcy, and Colin Egglesfield is Dex. The characters essential to the story remain present as the core focus of the movie. The novel and the movie share some typical similarities that one would see in a film adaptation. This radical move blows everything up, but it also, in the end, changes her life in a positive way. Rachel’s life turns outside down–the good girl she was becomes just as memory as she begins an affair with Dex. When Rachel turns 30, she realizes there is one thing she is missing and his name is Dex, also known as Darcy’s fiancé. If you happened to have missed my book review, “ Book Review: Something Borrowed,” this wonderful novel follows the life of protagonist, Rachel White as she tries to find what is missing in her life at the novel’s start, she is a practicing lawyer, she has her close friends Darcy and Hillary, and she seemingly has her life sorted out, but it all changes once she turns 30. If you caught the book review that precedes this, you already know my feelings on the Emily Giffin’s novel, Something Borrowed. 7/4/2023 0 Comments River Kings by Cat JarmanPartly the issue is that the interpretation of the objects has been based on a number of assumptions that lead to circular arguments, a serpent biting its own tail, going right the way back to the start of the Viking Age. Specifically, she is a bioarchaeologist, which means she uses forensic toolslike isotope analysis, carbon dating, and DNA analysisto try and figure out what happened to bodies buried more than a millennium ago. When it comes to women in the Viking Age, the conclusion has almost always been the former, which has had an enormous impact on how we have viewed women’s agency – their involvement and individual participation – in the entire period. River Kings is by archaeologist Dr Cat Jarman, who is a senior adviser to the new Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo. The recurring problem is trying to work out whether it was the object or its owner who travelled. But the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials. This is especially so in western Norway, where artefacts looted from Britain and Ireland have mostly been found in women’s graves. “Until recently it has been assumed that in similar cases in the Scandinavian homelands, exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. 7/4/2023 0 Comments Beyond the Bear by Dan BigleyFacing paralyzing pain and inconceivable loss, Dan was in no shape to be in a relationship. All of this was shattered by the mauling that nearly killed him, that left him blind and disfigured. After a year of being intrigued by a woman named Amber, they had just spent their first night together. He had just bought a cabin high in the Chugach Mountains with a view that went on forever. He had a job he loved taking troubled kids on outdoor excursions. Until then, one thing after another had fallen into place in Dan's life. "Upper nose, eyes, forehead anatomy unrecognizable," as the medevac report put it. Dan barely had time for "bear charging" to register before it had him on the ground, altering his life forever. Before it was over, after a stellar day of salmon fishing along Alaska's Kenai and Russian rivers, a grizzly came tearing around a corner in the trail. A 25-year-old backcountry wanderer, a man happiest exploring wild places with his dog, Dan Bigley woke up one midsummer morning to a day full of promise. Pancholy is perhaps best known for his role on NBC’s “30 Rock” where he played Jonathan, executive assistant to Alec Baldwin’s character, Jack Donaghy. As he grew older, Pancholy wondered how he would become an actor “being there was no one I could even look to and say, ‘That’s what I want to do.’” When those characters did begin appearing on screen, they were often the butt of a joke or a comedic sidekick. “There were never any brown characters, and there were certainly never any gay characters,” he said. He didn’t see people like himself in the pages of novels, and rarely were they on TV or in the movies. Even as a young boy, Maulik Pancholy loved stories – whether in books, on TV or in the movies, he was drawn to them.īut Pancholy noticed something very early on. 7/3/2023 0 Comments Tao te ching stephenTheir heroic stories are imagined as journeys over physical space (and in Aeneas’ case, through time) as well as through inward spaces. The heroes of myth are often on a journey – think Gilgamesh, or Heracles, or Odysseus, or Aeneas. The idea is not a new one -– it wasn’t even new when the work was written in the 6th-5th century BCE - that life is a journey. In writing this year about travel and books that involve travel, there is no way I could ignore the religious text that uses the idea of the “way” or “path” (what Tao means) as a fundamental metaphor for life. They have to be blabbermouths. But their words are (in the traditional Buddhist metaphor) fingers pointing at the moon if you watch the finger, you can't see the moon.” Mitchell then goes on to say, “That's the problem with spiritual teachers. In the notes to his translation of the Tao te Ching, Stephen Mitchell relates these words from Po Chu-i. How could he have been such a blabbermouth? This month, classic lit connoisseur Bernard Norcott-Mahany continues his year-long travel theme with a review of the Tao Te Ching, which he unofficially subtitles “It don’t mean a thing without Tao Te Ching.” 7/3/2023 0 Comments Dare me based on bookWith its shaded lines and heavy serif lettering, it more closely resembles an Art Nouveau etching than an Iron Maiden album cover from the 1990s, but it continued the tradition of florid, illustrative labels.Īs American craft beers have expanded beyond the IPAs of the ’90s and early 2000s, the look of the industry as a whole has generally become less over-the-top. It seems more interested in evoking its own world than in referencing tropes from another. Designed by Dan Blakeslee, an artist and musician who came to beer labels by way of concert posters, the now-iconic can features a bearded, bow-tied man sipping a glass of beer-breaking the brewery’s cardinal rule to drink from the can-as a cloud of hops explodes out of the top of his head. Heady Topper, first canned in 2011 by The Alchemist brewery in Vermont, represented the start of a shift. The bottle of its cult classic Zombie Dust, an American pale ale first released in 2010, features artwork of the undead by comic book artist Tim Seeley, who often dabbles in horror. Or, see Indiana’s 3 Floyds Brewing, founded the same year, which took a less medieval, more metal approach to its visual identity. Consider Stone Brewing, formed in California in 1996, whose labels center gargoyles in a variety of aggressive poses, and whose offerings include Stone IPA, an influential beer of the style. Breweries relied on intense imagery to telegraph an air of exclusivity. In the early days of craft beer, bottles and cans seemed to all be saying, or maybe screaming, the same thing: Drink me if you dare. |