Category Archives: Books

Lynn Rubright’s  Beyond the Beanstalk: Interdisciplinary Learning through Storytelling 

I found myself exclaiming, “Hey, neat!” at about every other page while I was reading Beyond the Beanstalk. Lynn Rubright, an educator and storyteller, developed the ideas and program suggestions for this book mostly while she was engaged in Project TELL … Continue reading

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Patricia A. McKillip’s  Alphabet of Thorn

His name was Daimon. Nepenthe had known him all her life, for he had found her and named her. Of the child she had been before she became Nepenthe, neither of them knew a thing. In sixteen years since then, … Continue reading

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Diana Wynne Jones’ The Merlin Conspiracy

Of the over forty books Diana Wynne Jones has written to date, I’ve read more than twenty. Her novel Fire and Hemlock, which draws on the legends of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, is one of my favorite books, … Continue reading

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Jameson Currier: The Wolf at the Door

Start with a loose-around-the-edges guesthouse, Le Petit Paradis, in the French Quarter. Add a collection of gay men, co-owners, former owner, and staff, of various ages from toothsome twenties to frowzy forties. Mix in various combinations of lovers, ex-lovers, current … Continue reading

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Neil Gaiman’s Day of the Dead: An Annotated Babylon 5 Script

Whenever two Babylon 5 fans meet, whether it’s at a used book store, a sci-fi speakeasy, or somewhere else that’s safe for our species, it doesn’t take long for conversation to turn to the required topics: “Who’s your favorite character?” “What’s your … Continue reading

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Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter’s Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth

Very rarely does one man’s genius receive the benefit of two lifetimes’ work. Christopher Tolkien has devoted himself to transcribing and editing his father J. R. R. Tolkien’s working papers for the immense imagined universe of Middle Earth. His enormous … Continue reading

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Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian Romances

Out of his desperate passion for Queen Guinevere, Lancelot accepts shame without hesitation and crawls on naked hands and knees across a bridge made of a single sword. Like an earlier Juliet, Fenice drinks a potion and pretends death to … Continue reading

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Joseph W. Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Where to start a discussion of a book on mythology that is itself nearly a legend? Joseph W. Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces is one of those landmark works of twentieth-century thought that have opened up new territory … Continue reading

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Karen Desrosiers et al’s A Group of One’s Own: Nurturing the Woman Writer

“Author Elizabeth Berg says, ‘There are groups that are all one sex; and there are those that are mixed. I have been in both and find that although a man’s point of view is of great value, I prefer, and … Continue reading

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Joseph Campbell’s Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal

Joseph Campbell, to those who have an interest in mythology as something other than stories, is a name that should be instantly recognizable. Through his writings he has pulled together the strands of mythology, folklore, psychology, and how they all … Continue reading

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