Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 103

Anne of Green Gables Week Tag

How perfect is this for my Year With Anne?  I just discovered, via Naomi Sarah, that a blogger named Miss Evie is hosting an Anne of Green Gables blog week!  Looks like I finished reading the original series just in time, eh?


To kick things off, she's provided a nice tag for anyone to fill out if they're so inclined.  I'm so inclined!  Here we go.
1. How did you get introduced to Anne of Green Gables?

When I was around 7 years old, a friend of my parents happened to have a co...

Jane Eyre Read-Along: Chapter 29

We now enter the section where my chapter posts become radically shorter because I have much less to say about the book, and you all breathe great, gasping sighs of relief.

So, Jane is recovering.  She's finding new friends.  She's going by an assumed name.  Things are looking up after the last, horrible chapter.  Whew.

Aren't the Rivers siblings an interesting contrast to Jane's Reed cousins that she grew up with?  Again, there are two girls and a boy.  But while...

"The Light in the Forest" by Conrad Richter

This book -- ohhhh, this book.  I hadn't read it in many years, but boy howdy, once I got into the first chapter, I had a tough time putting it down.  In fact, I read it in little over a day, and have just been trying to find time to blog about it since then.

True Son was adopted by the Lenne Lenapi tribe when he was four years old.  He's grown up as an Indian, and considers himself to be such.  But, thanks to a new treaty, all white captives must be returned to their blood...

"Rilla of Ingleside" by L. M. Montgomery

When I was a teen, this was one of my less-favorite Anne books.  I liked it better than Rainbow Valley and Anne of Ingleside, and I still do.  But overall, I don't like it nearly as much as the first five Anne books.

However, I actually think this might be one of the best-written books in the series.  It has a well-developed character arc for Rilla, it doesn't wander around on a lot of tangents, and the whole story is quite cohesive.

But I still only like it okay.  And...

Jane Eyre Read-Along: Chapter 28

Poor, poor Jane.  She's at a literal crossroads at the beginning of this chapter, and that's one of the most memorable images from this book, for me.  One of those moments that instantly spring to mind when I think of this book, especially the second half of it.

I'd forgotten how Romantic this chapter is.  Romantic as in the Romantic Era, not as in lovey-dovey.  I knew it was considered a Romantic novel as well as a Gothic one, but I'd forgotten how very into "nature is pur...

Small is Beautiful -- Book Blog Edition

I'm snurching this idea from Kara at Flowers of Quiet Happiness.  She recently featured three blogs with fewer than 100 followers, and I thought this was a great idea!  I have a lot of blogging friends with not-so-well-known blogs that I wish others would "discover."  So I am doing this tag even though I wasn't tagged with it.  (In fact, I'm doing it twice!  Once here, and once on my other blog.)  Here are five book-related blogs (that Kara didn't already feature...

Bookworm Gardens

While on vacation this month, we visited Bookworm Gardens in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  We'd never been there before, and I found it utterly enchanting.  So I'm going to share a few photos of it with you.  As well as this map, so you get an idea of what it's like:

(Click on image to make it bigger.)
Basically, they have different areas dedicated to different kinds of children's books, with structures and flowers and hands-on activities that relate to them.  I didn't take photos...

Jane Eyre Read-Along: Chapter 27

Um, yeah, so I went on vacation for a two-week whirlwind tour of friends and family in the midwest, and hosted a blog party at the same time, and poor Jane Eyre got neglected.  I will do better now!  Even though, now that I'm home and not going anywhere for a looooooong time and can focus on the book, we're heading into one of my less-favorite sections.  But that's okay.  We can finish this book.  We can!!!

So, off Jane goes, "cracking my heart-strings in rending them...

"The Outsiders" by S. E. Hinton

I first read The Outsiders when I was fourteen, same age as the protagonist, Ponyboy.  I had known that I led a safe, sheltered life, but it wasn't until I read this book that I truly realized how different my life was from what it could be.  It's one of the first books I can remember reading that felt very real to me, not like a made-up story.   I didn't learn until many years later that this was inspired by actual events, but somehow it has always felt real, right from the fi...

Tolkien Giveaway Winners!

Good morning!  (And yes, I mean it is a morning to be good on, a morning on which I feel good, and a morning that is good in and of itself, etc.)  Thank you, everyone, for making this party so much fun :-)  Even though I only managed two games, I think it went really well, and this is such a relief to me -- now I know that even if I'm horribly busy next year again, I can still host this for a fifth time!


So, now it's time to reveal the winners of the bookmark giveaway.  Tha...