Category Archives: Books

Marina Lostetter’s The Cage of Dark Hours

Marina Lostetter’s The Cage of Dark Hours is a sequel to her previously released The Helm of Midnight. As such it has a lot of characters and a complex setting to manage from the outset. Characters like Krona and Mandip … Continue reading

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Charles Todd’s The Cliff’s Edge

Charles Todd’s The Cliff’s Edge is the latest in his Bess Crawford series. With the same solitary nurse experienced in the worst of bloodshed as the lead, readers can slip firmly into the volume and have no expectation about going … Continue reading

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Max Gladstone’s Dead Country

Max Gladstone’s Dead Country is the first in his The Craft Wars trilogy, and the 7th in his Craft series overall. Billed as a standalone subseries and an introduction to the characters, the volume starts with lead Tara Abernathy returning … Continue reading

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John Ferguson’s Death of Mr. Dodsley

John Ferguson’s Death of Mr. Dodsley, a London Bibliomystery, is the latest in the British Library Crime Classics series. A relatively forgotten figure in mystery fiction, Ferguson produced just under a half dozen books featuring crime reporter Francis McNab and … Continue reading

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Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love With Hominids

This is a wonderful collection of short stories, and Nalo Hopkinson kept me reading stories that were just straight up horror that I would ordinarily just skip right over. Along with the horror, there’s dark fantasy, lighter, happier fantasy, and … Continue reading

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Neal Walters and Brian Mansfield’s musicHound Folk; Adam McGovern’s musicHound World; Simon Broughton’s The Rough Guide to World Music, Volumes One and Two; and John Guinn and Les Stone’s The St. James Opera Encyclopedia

The music guides of musicHound Folk, musicHound World, and The Rough Guide to World Music, Volume One have been in use by me for some time now. So which is the best, in my opinion? It depends on what you’re … Continue reading

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An omnibus review of books about music and musicians: Bagpipers, Deadheads, Joni Mitchell, Gilbert and Sullivan, and more

Anthony Baines’s Bagpipes (Pitt River Museum, Oxford University, 1995) Kevin McManus’s Ceilis, Jigs & Ballads: Irish Music in Liverpool (Liverpool Institute of Popular Music, 1994) Tomás Ó Canain’s Traditional Music in Ireland (Ossian Publications, 1993) Mairéad Sullivan’s Celtic Women in … Continue reading

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Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s Last Chance to See

Reading Last Chance To See is a bit of an odd experience these days, what with the much-loved primary author having gone prematurely extinct himself. That being said, Last Chance To See is a joy, a reminder of what we’ve … Continue reading

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Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish; Mostly Harmless; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul; and The Salmon of Doubt

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green … Continue reading

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John G. Gibson’s Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping 1745 – 1945

There are several traditions regarding the history of Scottish bagpiping that have been passed down from piper to piper over the last few hundred years. These doctrines are that the Disarming Act following the Battle of Culloden was responsible for … Continue reading

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