5/30/2023 0 Comments Tolkien lord of the ringsThis was a time when the legendary rings were forged and the dark Lord Sauron rose to power, a time when the island kingdom of Númenor flourished (and then fell), and elves and men were compelled to band together in order to do battle for the soul of Middle-earth. The series takes its cue from an appendix Tolkien wrote for the final instalment of his epic, slenderly outlining the history of Middle-earth's Second Age. Hobbits and hippies: Tolkien and the counterculture Why the world's most difficult novel is so rewarding Its characters include Galadriel and Elrond (both elves, who are conveniently immortal in Middle-earth) and small folk known as Harfoots that turn out to be the Hobbits' evolutionary predecessors – and then there are the iconic symbols that provide the series with its title: The Rings of Power. Despite being set thousands of years before the novel itself, Amazon Studios' new prequel to The Lord of the Rings promises to contain many of the ingredients beloved by Tolkien fans.
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5/30/2023 0 Comments Coyote by Kelly OliverSound familiar? If James Patterson and Janet Evanovich had a love child, meet Jessica James. Her Jessica James Mysteries are contemporary suspense featuring a former Montana barrel racer become philosophy graduate student. And much to her parent’s surprise, she managed to feed and clothe herself as a professional philosopher before giving up academia to become a mystery writer. Competing with peers who’d come from private schools and posh families “back East” her working-class backwoods grit served her well. She went from eating a steady diet of wild game shot by her dad (and playing drums with their hooves) to becoming a vegetarian while studying philosophy and pondering animal minds at Northwestern University where she got a PhD in philosophy. On both sides, her ancestors were some of the first settlers in Northern Idaho. The only thing they agreed on was Canadian rye whiskey. Her maternal grandfather was a forest ranger committed to saving the trees, and her paternal grandfather was a logger hell bent on cutting them down. Kelly grew up in the Northwest-Montana, Idaho, and Washington states. Kelly Oliver is the author of three award-winning bestselling mystery series and dozens of nonfiction books. 5/30/2023 0 Comments A swim on the pond in the rainIn A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. How necessary, at our particular moment' Tessa Hadley _ From the New York Times-bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves - and our world today. THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, IRISH TIMES, SPECTATOR, TLS, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY, I PAPER, PROSPECT, REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021 'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021 'This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. 5/30/2023 0 Comments George herbert poem prayerThe six-days world transposing in an hour,Ī kind of tune, which all things hear and fear Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth Įngine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age, I have continually refreshed my spirit by dipping back into Herbert’s The Temple in order to, as he puts it, “ relish versing” and “suck every letter” of the Holy Scriptures he so loved.Īs a mid-Lenten devotion or perhaps “prayer in time of plague,” I am contemplating one short poem by Herbert called “Prayer” on weekdays up to Holy Week. Sometimes one may go back to an early inspiration and be – for shame! – embarrassed by him. The priest-poet George Herbert (1593-1633) was one of the Evangelists along the way of my pilgrimage to Christ as a university student. I have compiled them serially in three posts and hope they may continue to inspire prayer during this season. Note: the following five meditations on George Herbert’s sonnet “Prayer,” with commentary by Dennis Lennon, Turning the Diamond, were first posted during Lent 2020. 5/30/2023 0 Comments Brida storyIt is a tale of love, passion, mystery and spirituality. This enthralling novel incorporates themes fans of Paulo will love. Her skin is always that tan color and they always look so smooth. Shes very short at 4 10, blonde hair, brown eyes.wide hipped but amazing legs and feet. She works in my company, but was already married at the time. She seeks her destiny, as she struggles to find a balance between her relationships and her desire to become a witch. I was actually attracted to my sister in law before ever even meeting my wife. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, and teaches her about overcoming her fears and trusting in the goodness of the world, and a woman who teaches her how to dance to the music of the world, and how to pray to the moon. Meanwhile, Brida pursues her course ever deeper into the mysteries of life, seeking to answer questions about who she is. Her teachers sense that Brida has a gift, but cannot tell what that is. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach her about the world. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic, but is searching for something more. Description: This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans-diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries-behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families-many US citizens-were incarcerated. 5/30/2023 0 Comments The paris apartment book reviewJess may have come to Paris to escape her past, but it’s starting to look like it’s Ben’s future that’s in question. Ben’s neighbors are an eclectic bunch, and not particularly friendly. The longer Ben stays missing, the more Jess starts to dig into her brother’s situation, and the more questions she has. Only when she shows up – to find a very nice apartment, could Ben really have afforded this? – he’s not there. Her half-brother Ben didn’t sound thrilled when she asked if she could crash with him for a bit, but he didn’t say no, and surely everything will look better from Paris. She’s broke and alone, and she’s just left her job under less than ideal circumstances. GoodReads Synopsis: Jess needs a fresh start. Thank you to William Morrow for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. The underlying sense is that if a matter is so important as to be considered life-or-death, it should be paid attention to. Death's presence in this work provides the reader with a plethora of gloomy or gruesome situations, and it also heightens the stakes of the issues that are at hand in the work. As a motif, death allows the speaker to reflect on her own responses to mortality and the deaths of those around her. Death (motif)ĭeath is a commonly recurring motif throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Additionally, the ads, snippets of conversation, ideas, themes, etc that Rankine sees on the TV are notable because they are intrinsically tied to this issue of national identity as well as a feeling of "numbness" or exceptionalism that distances viewers from whatever they see on the TV screen. As a symbol, the television represents collective American identity, as it is normalized throughout the text as an "everyday" object that people turn to for their news, entertainment, gossip, and more. The motif bleeds into the theme of television and its reverberance in our life. The speaker uses the television as a motif to anchor discussion of the media and political situations. Throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely, the television is a recurring motif and symbol. Buy Study Guide The television (motif and symbol) Yet as the 1940s took off, he matured and wrote his first published works in a row, including a novel based upon the life of Vincent van Gogh, Abel Gholarts (1944, not available in translation). During the 1930s he tried time and again to write something worthwhile, but in vain. As a literary author Boon was not an early bloomer. During evenings and weekends he studied art at the Aalsterse Academie voor Schone Kunsten but soon had to abandon his studies due to lack of funds. Boon left school at age 16 to work for his father as a carriage painter. When he was very young Boon witnessed the shooting of a prisoner by a German soldier, otherwise the First World War, which ended when Boon was only six years old, left little traces in his writings. He was born Lodewijk Paul Aalbrecht Boon in Aalst, Belgium to a working-class family. 5/29/2023 0 Comments Looking for Alaska by John GreenSoon after arriving at Culver Creek, Miles meets his roommate, Chip "The Colonel" Martin. Miles is fond of reading biographies, and particularly of memorizing the subjects' last words. He uses Francois Rabelais’s last words-"I go to seek a Great Perhaps"-as his argument for choosing boarding school at such a late age. Looking for Alaska opens as the narrator, Miles Halter, leaves his home in Florida to attend Culver Creek Preparatory High School in Alabama for his junior year. For Miles, nothing can ever be the same again. Gorgeous, clever and undoubtedly screwed-up, Alaska draws Miles into her reckless world and irrevocably steals his heart. Miles Halter's whole life has been one big non-event, until he meet Alaska Young. The characters and events of the plot are grounded in Green's life, while the story itself is fictional. The novel is based on his time at Indian Springs School, where Green wrote the novel as a result of his desire to create meaningful young adult fiction. Looking for Alaska is John Green's first novel, published in March 2005 by Dutton Juvenile. |