Mar 20
2005
Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey are the co-authors of Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes, two classic memoirs that no one from a large family should miss. Frank Jr. an...
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Mar 20
2005
Although he had worked as a writer for comic books and radio and his novel The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award in 1953, Alfred Bester was never really what you'd call a household name. Be...
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Mar 15
2005
Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly, a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies at Fordham University. Ms. James is one of the few absolutely reliable writers of historical romances....
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Mar 15
2005
To paraphrase Jane Austen, there are few romance novelists whom I really love, and fewer still of whom I think well. Eloisa James is one of the few writers whom I both love (well, more or less) and think well of—at least well enough to shell out the full cover price for, an honor that I reserve for a mere handful of authors. Her eight romance novels are fresh, well written twists on old favorites...
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Mar 2
2005
I enjoy books about home restoration. I once wrote a term paper passionately defending Martha Stewart's status as an American icon. I have a serious crush on Alton Brown and an even more serious one on Red Green. And while I am rarely tempted to actually attempt any of the projects that I read about or see on television, I always find the sight of other people creating stuff to be tremendously satisfying...
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Feb 28
2005
A teacher for 32 years, Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote and re-wrote her first book, The Boxcar Children, testing it out on her students until she had honed it into a story that was both easy to re...
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Feb 28
2005
Pilot, poet, and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had one of those adventurous, emotionally messy lives that produce remarkable art but always seem to end badly. (And early.) Sure, he wrote and...
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Feb 28
2005
For a state that I associate mostly with soy bean farming and Biodiesel, Minnesota is peculiarly rich in Wordcandy goodness. A surprising number of famous American authors (Garrison Keillor, Laur...
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Feb 28
2005
Ballet Shoes is the first and best novel in Noel Streatfeild’s 10-book-long series about the lives of British child actors in the first half of the twentieth century. (Only a few of these books h...
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Feb 28
2005
Born in 1912, writer and critic Eleanor Cameron is best remembered as the author of the charmingly bizarre Mushroom Planet books. The first book in this imaginative, entertaining series, 1954’s T...
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Feb 13
2005
Scottish author, physician, and Spiritualism expert, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Although one might quibble over the true literary "ge...
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Feb 13
2005
Comic book writer and artist Bill Willingham has achieved Wordcandy-status based on the sheer awesomeness of Fables: Legends in Exile, his current series for Vertigo. In Willingham's Fabletown, a...
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Feb 13
2005
It is rare for me to recommend a writer of historical romances that feature a pre-Regency setting. I'm sure that there are plenty of very entertaining books out there with medieval or Elizabetha...
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Feb 12
2005
Neal Stephenson, like fellow Wordcandy authors Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt, occasionally seems like he's written entire novels for the sole purpose of flaunting his intelligence and bone-deep hipne...
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Feb 11
2005
Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract is quite possibly the world's most prosaic romance novel. If bodice-ripping paperback covers make your eyes twitch, if soppy love stories leave you feeling fain...
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Jan 26
2005
From fairy tales to Edward Gorey, we here at Wordcandy have long enjoyed stories about bad things happening to good children. British author Joan Aiken has been a steady contributor to this fine literary subgenre, from the 1962 publication of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to the recent (posthumous) publication of the last book in her Wolves Chronicles, The Witch of Clatteringshaws...
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Jan 24
2005
Wilkie Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, and his books, while less famous, share many of Dickens’s strengths. (Collins was also less of a tool on the personality front, apparently.) ...
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Jan 24
2005
Like A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, Scottish author Sir J. M. Barrie's most famous work walks a fine line between preciousness and genuine fun--and manages, most of the time, to keep its ba...
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Jan 24
2005
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
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Jan 24
2005
As with pretty much all fantasy stories published in the past decade, Herbie Brennan’s Faerie Wars series is routinely compared to Harry Potter, although the two series have almost nothing in comm...
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Jan 13
2005
Please note: the plot of Diana Wynne Jones's novel Deep Secret is convoluted, the characters are slow to develop, and Jones's conception of magic is not the usual whiz-bang Harry Potter-style acti...
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Jan 7
2005
Truman Capote was a high school dropout-turned-journalist-turned-novelist-turned-socialite who achieved tremendous success at a remarkably young age, produced one of the most iconic novellas of th...
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Jan 7
2005
Ruth Rendell has written some of the most ruthlessly unpleasant books we’ll ever recommend here at Wordcandy. The tone, characterization, and plotting in her psychological suspense/British police...
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Jan 7
2005
Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell's self-described "softer, more feminine" alterego. While the Vine novels are considerably longer and they do differ slightly in tone from the Rendell books, don't pic...
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Dec 31
2004
Cameron Dokey is yet another author of re-told fairy tales. (Pretty soon we're going to need a special icon for just for those, aren't we?) I've read more imaginative and richly characterized ex...
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Dec 21
2004
Son of an Irish ear and eye doctor and a flamboyant nationalistic poet, Oscar Wilde is best known for his deliciously giddy plays "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "An Ideal Husband". His oth...
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Dec 8
2004
Laura Esquivel's fame hit the high-water mark with the 1993 release of Like Water For Chocolate. (The book and film versions of Like Water For Chocolate were released in the U.S. at the same time,...
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Dec 8
2004
English mystery novelist P.D. James is best known for her Adam Dalgliesh novels, although I expect that her two Cordelia Gray novels (which loosely connect to the Dalgliesh series) picked up in ci...
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Dec 7
2004
A mystery/romance told entirely through letters (which have to be taken out of the book and read) and lushly illustrated postcards, Canadian author Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine stories are th...
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Dec 7
2004
Although Robert Graves primarily thought of himself as a poet, he is best known as the author of the 1934 novel I, Claudius. A chatty faux-memoir, I, Claudius is possibly the most educational pot...
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