Category Archives: Books

Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time audiobook

  First let me stress that the LibriVox version of this audiobook is a piece of shit with both a lousy narrator and an appalling lack of proper production. Consider yourself warned. Oh and despite the claim that this work … Continue reading

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Charles Stross’ The Annihilation Score (A Laundry Files Novel) 

Consider the matter of an antique violin, one of a number constructed by a man called Erich Zan, and made of human bone taken from multiple live donors, which are solely intended to produce music capable of murdering demons. The … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny’s My Name is Legion audiobook

If you go to any of the major legal online sources for audiobooks such as iTunes, you’ll find very little to be head for this author. Oh you’ll find The Chronicles of Amber novels, all ten of them which is … Continue reading

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Carol Ballard’s The Greenman: The Shakespeare Connection

When I was a child — long, long ago, eons before GUIs, desktop publishing and digital cameras — I loved taking tours of historical old houses. One of the highlights of touring such old places, aside from the wonderful old … Continue reading

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Laura Shamas’ We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters

Forest, trees: there is a certain brand of scholarship that tends to focus on minute examinations of trees in the attempt to discover a forest. I am the last to decry the idea of analyzing parts in the hope of … Continue reading

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John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera

The Beggar’s Opera, or at least the edition I recieved for review, and I, have an unusual history. Ever since I received this book in the mail, one thing after another manifested to distract me from my mission. Every time … Continue reading

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Angela Carter’s Wise Children

It’s a wise child that knows its own father — and wiser yet the father who knows his own child. Carter’s novel draws its name from the quote above (the quote also appears as dialogue). The titular “wise children” are … Continue reading

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Elizabeth Hand’s Illyria

Elizabeth Hand’s new novel Illyria follows in a long tradition of science fiction and fantasy stories which reference the works of Shakespeare, particularly the romances, and Hand’s lyrical writing style is a wonderful fit for the dark romance she sets out to … Continue reading

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Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-Earth

I overheard an interesting conversation that took place during High Tea in The Robert Graves Memorial Reading Room here in the Estate Library on a rainy afternoon while our Librarian was taking a break from fussing over the edition of Green Man Review he … Continue reading

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Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community

Anyone who has ever read of the legendary group of writers called the Inklings, about their friendship and lives as Oxford academics, has likely wondered about the nature of this long standing group. Its two most commercially successful authors, Tolkien … Continue reading

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