Aug 25
2005
Ngaio Marsh, one of the four “Great Ladies” of English mystery writing, had a career that spanned approximately fifty years, beginning in 1932 and ending with her death in the 1980s. While her my...
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Aug 25
2005
Farley Mowat, author of the Canadian classics Owls in the Family and Never Cry Wolf, is actually quite the figure of controversy in Canada. His detractors (including The Toronto Star) have sugges...
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Aug 25
2005
Scottish-born author A. A. Milne is best remembered as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. This delightful series has the distinction of being perhaps the only literary creation that Disney ...
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Aug 25
2005
Andrew Clements has written a series of pleasantly earnest, thoughtful children’s books, including the excellent YA sci-fi/fantasy Things Not Seen. Clements spent several years as a teacher, and ...
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Aug 25
2005
Frenchman Lewis Trondheim is the author of about fifty bazillion comic books, the majority of which are being (slowly) translated into English. His series Dungeon, co-written with Joann Sfar, is ...
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Jul 11
2005
Jean Craighead George has written many interesting, lofty-minded, award-winning novels. Of these, my favorite is My Side of the Mountain, a beautiful story about a young boy who runs away from ho...
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Jul 11
2005
Stephanie Barron is the author of a series of novels featuring Jane Austen as an amateur detective. Ms. Barron's books are structured as Austen's long-lost diaries, recently discovered in an atti...
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Jul 11
2005
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great is an amateur detective with a loyal dog, an assortment of weird friends, and a profound (perhaps existential?) hunger for pancakes. He is also the hero ...
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Jul 11
2005
Debi Gliori's Pure Dead... series is like an amalgamation of the Artemis Fowl stories, the Addams Family cartoons, and the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Nothing about these books is particu...
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Jul 11
2005
Daphne du Maurier's major Wordcandy contribution is her gothic suspense novel Rebecca. Rebecca has never been a particular favorite of mine--I've always regarded it as an inferior version of Jane...
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Jul 11
2005
(Sorry--this is less a Book of the Week Review than it is book-related musings.) So... have you all been following the completely bizarre courtship of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? (And if not, you totally should be! May we suggest www.pinkisthenewblog.com as a particularly fine source for TomKat news?) Anyway, in a(nother) vaguely disturbing interview...
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Jun 24
2005
Agatha Christie is the world's most famous mystery writer. She's right up there with the Bible and Shakespeare in terms of sales, you can find her books in 45 different languages, and her most fa...
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Jun 24
2005
Warning: Damning Confession (for a bibliophile) Straight Ahead: I... I have always felt that Agatha Christie's stories make better TV shows than they do books. I know! I'm sorry! Just typing t...
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Jun 24
2005
English mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers understood that what this world really needed was a crime-solving hero that was equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. She set o...
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Jun 24
2005
Scottish novelist, poet, and clergyman George MacDonald is the author of a pair of pleasantly Victorian children's classics: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. While these g...
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Jun 24
2005
If the children's books of George MacDonald have "fallen out of fashion", then the books of Margery Sharp are the literary equivalent of the bustle... and I really have no idea why. What happened...
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Jun 24
2005
Much like fellow Wordcandy authors Julia Quinn and Suzanne Enoch, Karen Hawkins is less spectacular than she is consistently entertaining. She has yet to write a novel that knocks my socks off, b...
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Apr 28
2005
My copy of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Greensleeves is battered, ugly, and features a gigantic stamp on the dust jacket reading "THIS IS NO LONGER THE PROPERTY OF THE SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY"...
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Apr 24
2005
John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain stories about Tom, his brilliant and conniving older brother, are a series of charmingly offbeat tall tales. According to Fitzgerald, Tom was the youngest con man...
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Apr 24
2005
Bram Stoker was a mediocre Irish playwright and theatrical manager who produced exactly one memorable book: 1897's Dracula. It has been suggested that Stoker's horror story was inspired by a comb...
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Apr 24
2005
It was a tremendous blow to readers everywhere when Shel Silverstein died of a heart attack in 1999. Still, like Douglas Adams, Silverstein got an awful lot done during the limited time he spent ...
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Apr 24
2005
Although I can't seem to find out anything on this woman's personal life (I know! Google has failed me!), from the mid-seventies to the early nineties, Jacqueline Gilbert was one of the best auth...
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Apr 24
2005
(Information complied with the assistance of Colleen, an University of Oregon reference librarian, and Eric Gjovaag, webmaster of the The Wizard of Oz Info website. Many thanks to both of them!) ...
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Mar 29
2005
Contrary to popular myth, Edward Gorey was not British. In fact, he only traveled outside of the United States once, on a trip to the Scottish Isles. Gorey was born in Chicago in 1925, he studie...
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Mar 29
2005
English author Mary Norton was the author of two children's literature classics: the Borrowers series and Bed Knob and Broomstick, which inspired the (...sigh) Disney film of the same name. Norto...
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Mar 29
2005
Laura Zigman was one of those authors whose first book, 1998's Animal Husbandry, came out hot on the heels of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, and because it was also a story about a romanc...
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Mar 29
2005
British humorist Jerome K. Jerome's stories are like slightly sub-par P.G. Wodehouse novels. (Ordinarily that would be a criticism, but most of Wodehouse's stories are works of such staggering ge...
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Mar 29
2005
I love Beverly Cleary's books. Mostly because they're awesome, of course, but also because Ramona, Beezus, Ellen, Henry Huggins, and all their friends live in the same neighborhood that my late, ...
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Mar 20
2005
Bill Watterson is the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes, in Watterson's own words, was about "private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of cer...
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Mar 20
2005
David Macaulay is the author of a series of semi-fictional books about how things are built. His stories about the construction of cathedrals, castles, mosques, and pyramids, all of which are ill...
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