I had to go see my family for Christmas. This may have been an error. I was there for far too long and I also was caught in the Southwest Airlines holiday fiasco, so I got back "home" two days later than I was originally supposed to. "You are at your mom's? You need to come up w/a new plan. Moms are alright for a little while," texted a friend from Kentucky. Well, here we are. It was kind of weird to be on the other side of Florida. They had a cute bookstore, though. I spent a lot of time and money in there. I picked up The Crossing Places because it was on the shelf of staff picks at Tombolo Books. I happened to flip it over and read the back cover, which is something that I don't always do. (The cover I posted here is not the cover that I saw in the store; this cover is much better.) This was a fun mystery. I did not figure it out (the red herring was kind of wild and large), the main character was a delight, and it made me wish that I'd had an actually good Archaeology professor in college (I withdrew from that class on the advice of an Archaeology graduate student - the professor was using a workbook from the 1980s for our class assignments and was clearly not reading our papers). It was a fun, quick read, and I'm actually looking forward to more books with this character.
I LOVED LOVED LOVED Sunless Solstice. I love a spooky Christmas story from the English countryside! This had a variety of fun ghostly stories that take place around Christmas - the British Library publishes these and there are three other books themed around Christmas-time. I have two of them on order. It was cold in Florida at the time I was reading these, and it made me just want to be next to a fireplace, drinking some mulled wine and eating fine cheeses. They're older tales, so it surprised me that one was directly about demonology - it seems more like a modern subject. When I was about halfway through Sunless Solstice I went back to the bookstore and bought Randalls Round. It was sort of Lovecraftian in that there were a lot of indescribable terrors. As one keeps reading Randalls Round, a pattern begins to emerge of the stories ending in a place where they feel distinctly unfinished. There was a very intriguing story called 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' that really ended leaving me with so many questions: Then what? Did the American sell the house? Did they try to find out what the treasure was? Are you just living in a house with a weird tentacle creature in your walls? If you like closure in a spooky story, this is not the book for you - I might go so far as to say that in some stories the story ends directly at the conflict. There are two stories included with Randalls Round that may or may not be the work of the same author, but those two stories have full conclusions so it seems unlikely. I have mixed feelings about it. I also picked up Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas (it was the last one). This is the only thing by Tolkien I've ever read. It reminds me that Tolkien was into Santa Claus and C.S. Lewis thought Santa was dumb...I feel like I read that somewhere...if you don't have time for Santa Claus you're Feliz Navi-dead to me. This is a collection of the letters Tolkien wrote to his children. They are super delightful, they include characters and drawings and he would design stamps for the envelopes and all. I haven't finished this one yet, but I'm inspired to start writing my own. Hope you had a meaningful Chanuka!
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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