Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 16

A Tolkien Blog Party 2023 -- Kick-off Post + Tag!

Welcome, friends!  Here we are again, all geared up to celebrate Professor Tolkien and his creations for the eleventh year in a row.  Are you ready?  I'm ready!  Let's party!
If this is your first time attending a Tolkien Blog Party here at the Edge of the Precipice, I will briefly explain how this works.  As host, I provide a couple of games for you to play (starting tomorrow), a giveaway (which you can enter here), and the official party tag (see below).  Everything else is up to you and your f...

Giveaway for the 2023 Tolkien Blog Party

Let's get this party started with a giveaway, shall we?  This year, I am giving away six prizes!  Here are some details about each one:

Prize One: an enamel pin from A Fine Quotation depicting symbols of elves, hobbits, and dwarves.  This pin is about two inches wide.

Prize Two: a set of five bookmarks from A Fine Quotation that feature Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Frodo, along with a quotation from each one of them.  This five-bookmark set has been discontinued, so it is a rare find now!...

"Mojave Crossing" by Louis L'Amour

I say!  This book is a rollicking good time.  It's all about Tell Sackett again, star of the earlier book Sackett , but this time he gets a much more straight-forward and focused story, and I appreciated that.  His narration wasn't quite as drily humorous, though that did return here and there, but I overall liked this book about him better.
Tell Sackett is basically just on his way to exchange a whole lot of gold for some trade goods in California.  Then he'll head back to Arizona and sell the tr...

"The Black Pearl" By Scott O'Dell

When I was in my teens, I read and reread every Scott O'Dell book my local library had.  Which was not many, alas.  Oh, they had Island of the Blue Dolphins and Sing Down the Moon and Streams to the River, Rivers to the Sea.  Maybe Sarah Bishop, or maybe I got my own copy of that one, I forget.  But I am quite sure they didn't have The Black Pearl, because I have not read it before this.  
I'm happy to say that I do still really, truly enjoy O'Dell's storytelling.  He's a no-frills sort of writer...

"Carry On, Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse

Earlier this summer, a friend shared this news article that stated that Penguin Random House has started censoring P. G. Wodehouse's books.  Incensed by this kind of Nazi-esque behavior, I went to various used book sites and bought up a complete collection of the Jeeves books, all in one cool, older paperback edition that I really liked the looks of.  While the CEO of Penguin Random House later released this statement saying that the whole issue has been blown way out of proportion, I still pref...

Polishing Off My 10 Books of Summer List

Remember when I joined the 20 Books of Summer challenge back in June?  Well, August has ended, so I need to see which books from my prospective list I did actually read!

Here's my list:
 by Stephanie Landsem ✔ Lando  by Louis L'Amour ✔ Les Miserables  by Victor Hugo ✔ Murder at Kensington Palace  by Andrea Penrose ✔Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse ✔ (review coming!)A Name Long Buried by C. M. Banschbach ✖Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome ✖ (21 pages left!) Sackett  by Louis L'Amour ✔Then ...

"The Last Atlantean" by Emily Hayse

Emily Hayse's books have a kind of direct, inevitable heroism that I find enthralling.  Her prose suits other and older worlds, filled with larger-than-life heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses.  This whole book felt like a movie made in the 1950s but set a few decades earlier.  
Hattie is a lighthouse keeper's daughter living in Maine in 1912.  A stranger washes up on shore one night, and Hattie rescues him, helps nurse him back to health, and falls in love with them.
Not even halfway t...

"Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo

Ahem.
First, let me be clear: I read this book twenty-ish years ago, between my junior and senior years of college.  I also am quite happy to read very long classics.  And French classics.  The Count of Monte Cristo, which was published nearly twenty years before Les Miserables, and is at least as long and very equally French, is my second-favorite book of all time.  The problem here is not that I don't know how to read and understand books from the 1800s, that I don't appreciate the French, or t...

Announcing A Tolkien Blog Party for 2023

Won't you join me next month for my eleventh annual Tolkien Blog Party?  It will be the usual festive mix of party games, a blog tag, a giveaway, and lots of contributions from you, all celebrating Tolkien and his creations.

While the focus is usually on Middle-earth, reviews of or posts about Tolkien's other works, or about the professor himself, are always welcome!

This year's party will run during Tolkien Week, which ends on Hobbit Day, otherwise known as Bilbo and Frodo's birthday, September 2...

"The Witch at the Edge of the Woods" by Jenni Sauer

What a beautiful, big story wrapped up in a tiny novella!  I read nearly all of this book while at my daughters' gymnastics practice, and I kept getting tears in my eyes, refusing to cry, and then sneezing from the held-back tears.  By the end of the book, I'm pretty sure the other parents nearby thought either I had the plague or really bad allergies.  Oops!
Eva Behnam lives in a cottage at the edge of the woods.  She's not exactly a witch, she simply is from another race and world than the one ...