Vintage Tales discussion

I haven’t read that one yet, either, Werner.

Glad to hear it's really good, Rosemarie.

Yesterday, I started on a review copy of the fantasy novel The Eye of Ebon by P. Pherson Green, the opener for his projected White Sword Saga. This is a book I'm reading aloud to my wife; I generally don't read review copies that way, because it takes longer than reading a book to myself. But in this case, it allows me to start on it much earlier than I could otherwise, since I have a fairly thick interlibrary loan book that I need to read next month (long story!).

With the aid of the Goodreads group What's the Name of That Book??? (https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... ), after a quest lasting several years, I recently tracked down a story collection I read as a kid, Case for Mr. Fortune, by Golden Age English mystery writer H.C. Bailey, featuring his series character Reggie Fortune. I started rereading it yesterday.

I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
And I recently finished Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie

I just finished Pride and Prejudice tonight.😊 It was a surprisingly delightful read!

I'm reading Wild Wales by George Borrow, in a very vintage edition.

Katherine wrote: "I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
And I recently finished Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie"

I just love Pride and Prejudice, I hope you enjoy it Rosemarie! I have Peter Pan on my list to read as I have never actually read it yet, how did you find it? 😊📚

Vickie wrote: "I just finished Pride and Prejudice tonight.😊 It was a surprisingly delightful read!"

Pride and Prejudice is on of my favourite books! Glad you enjoyed it 😊

I am currently reading Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy and I am really enjoying it! 😊📚

Vickie wrote: "I just finished Pride and Prejudice tonight.😊 It was a surprisingly delightful read!"

Good to hear. I'm liking it too 😊
My first Jane Austen read. I'm a little late to the party.

Isabella wrote: "Katherine wrote: "I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
And I recently finished Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie"

I j..."

I read it in eBook form on my kindle.
This one with illustrations from Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26654

Sadly, I don't have enough room to keep very many print books 😞

Katherine wrote: "I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
And I recently finished Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie"

I absolutely love Pride and Prejudice and read it at least once/year!

Vickie wrote: "I just finished Pride and Prejudice tonight.😊 It was a surprisingly delightful read!"

It is one of my favourite books!

I am reading The Hobbit by J.R.R, Tolkien for the first time! I have a feeling it won't be my last Tolkien book for me. :) I am also rereading Deuteronomy and Joshua ESV

2025 will see the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. My library colleague Paula would like to do an Austen-themed program for the library's face-to-face Book Club; and to hopefully pique student interest, she'd like to feature the spin-off novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. So I'm reading the latter in order to be able to contribute to that discussion, and started on it today.

I'm rereading Middlemarch. Reading this book has a relaxing effect on me and I just love character-driven novels. So this time around I'm going to savor every moment like I did before and really take my time with this, read every footnote, etc.

I'm reading Wild Wales by George Borrow, a relaxing read.

Well, I bailed on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after three days (this note explains why: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ).

I'm now reading a book I got for Christmas, The Accidental Keyhand by Jen Swann Downey, the opener for her The Ninja Librarians series. It's written for younger readers, and has a 12-year-old protagonist; but that doesn't bother me, and I'm enjoying it so far!

I'm currently reading Jane Eyre. Figured it was finally time to get to this one.😏

I'm currently reading Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.
and Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer

Vickie wrote: "I'm currently reading Jane Eyre. Figured it was finally time to get to this one.😏"


This one of my favourite books! I hope you enjoy reading it. 😊📚

Isabella wrote: "Vickie wrote: "I'm currently reading Jane Eyre. Figured it was finally time to get to this one.😏"


This one of my favourite books! I hope you enjoy reading it. 😊📚"

Thank you, so far I am!😊

Back in the late summer of 2023, I started reading The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy intermittently, in snatches between other books. Given that the book has 947 poems, and by today my intermittent reading had gotten me through just 234 of them in over 17 months, that wasn't working too well. So although it will be a gargantuan read, as of today I've started reading the rest of it straight through.

My Goodreads friend Heather Day Gilbert is a writer I've often mentioned here, and a favorite for both me and my wife. As of yesterday, we started reading her newest novel, Queen of Hearts (2024). Though she's not a new writer in the mystery genre, as this book is a stand-alone work of psychological suspense, it's a new departure for her; she likes to read novels in this subgenre, but hasn't published one of her own until this one.

Robin of Sherwood, the book I started this morning, is the fourth and final installment of The Clerk of Copmanhurst's Tales, a Robin Hood re-telling by my Goodreads friend, G.K. Werner. I greatly enjoyed the first three volumes, so I'm looking forward to this one with much anticipation!

Over a period of about nine years, I read and liked the first several books of the Kim Oh series (now renamed the Real Dangerous Girl series) by K.W. Jeter. But I lost respect for his artistic integrity after he changed the protagonist's ethnicity from Korean to white, and rewrote all the books to change all the character's names. :-( I've now started on a back-to-back read of the last two books, Real Dangerous Ride and Real Dangerous Plan, just because I want to see the completion of Kim's arc (no matter what she's called). But I don't plan to promote either book by reviewing it.

A book I requested by interlibrary loan arrived yesterday, so I've started reading it today. It's The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett, the second book in her swords-and-planet SF The Book of Skaith series. The first one, The Ginger Star, earned five stars from me last year; so I'm looking forward to this read, and hope to finish reading the trilogy before the end of this year.

While I was waiting for this book to come, I started dipping into the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories, which I gave my wife for Christmas back in 2012, but have never read myself. (It's edited by John Jakes, who began his career as a writer of Westerns, and always remained a fan of the genre.) This one goes on my "being read intermittently" shelf.

Undercover Colorado Conspiracy by Jodie Bailey, part of Harlequin's Love Inspired (Suspense) imprint, is a book I gave Barb for Christmas last year. Neither the book nor the imprint initially interested me very much; but nevertheless, we decided it was one we could read together, and we started a bit over a week ago. (I'd meant to post about it here earlier, but got sidetracked at the time!)

Hi Werner! So sorry for my absence around here lately. I have been in yet another reading slump, but now I'm out of that and so glad about it! Thank you for keeping the conversation going here lately:) I am going to be reading one or the other of these two books: Middlemarch for the 2nd time, or The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. The answer isn't in yet which one. But soon!

No need to apologize, Gia; reading slumps sometimes happen to people! We're just glad to hear that you've gotten past it. Both Middlemarch and The Moonstone earned high ratings from me, and I'm sure you'll find either of them a great read.

Okay good, and I am too. Very cool and good to know:) I'll report back when I figure it out, lol!

Sounds good, Gia! :-)

Decided to get back to some Jane Austen, so I started Sense and Sensibility today.

That was the first Jane Austen book I read-it was a fun read. Then I watched the move version and enjoyed it as well.

Rosemarie wrote: "That was the first Jane Austen book I read-it was a fun read. Then I watched the move version and enjoyed it as well."

Was that the movie version starring Emma Thompson? I think that one is outstanding!

Yeah, Rosemarie, I plan on watching the movie afterwards as well. I'll check out that one, Werner.

Vickie wrote: "Yeah, Rosemarie, I plan on watching the movie afterwards as well. I'll check out that one, Werner."

I hope you like it, Vickie!

Thanks, Werner!

It was that version, Werner.

In another group, I'm taking part in this month's common read of The Case of the Late Pig by "Golden Age" British mystery writer Margery Allingham (I started a bit late). It's a reread for me, but my previous read was as a teen, so there's a fair bit I don't remember (though I do recall the identity of the culprit!). This is the eighth novel featuring the author's series sleuth Albert Campion, but the only one (and as far as I can recall, the only sample of her work) that I've read.

Later this month, I'm expecting to spend a few days in the area of Harrisonburg, Virginia, visiting family. On such trips, I usually spend some time in the public library there (long story!), during which I generally read intermittently in a short story collection, since the format is better suited than a novel or monograph for long hiatuses between spurts of reading on multiple visits, that may be spread over a couple of years. Here at home, I'm already intermittently reading a story anthology, but it's not one that library has.

However, both that library and the BU library here do have an omnibus edition of every Father Brown mystery that G.K. Chesterton ever wrote (albeit in different printings by different publishers, and with different editors). So, I've also begun intermittently reading The Father Brown Omnibus, which has long been on my to-read shelf. That will give me a head start, and let me continue the read for a bit after returning home.

I have recently read Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart which i loved and highly recommend.
And am currently reading The Hunt for Red October Tom Clancy.

Although I've read two or three poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), back in the 90s, when I was homeschooling our girls (the only one I actually remember is "Bury Me in a Free Land"), I've never read any of her prose. Her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted has been on my to-read shelf for several years, and now I've finally begun reading it, as part of my project of reading more literature by writers of color.

I finished Sense and Sensibility, and now I'm on to Mansfield Park.

Barb are I are continuing our reading of the Avenging Angels series by "A. W. Hart" (which is a house pen name used by multiple authors) with Overturned Heart. It's actually the twelfth, and final, series installment, so we're reading it quite a bit out of order. I wanted to find out whether the romantic arcs for our main characters that were begun (or in Sara's case, potential) in the first book really come to fruition. :-)

Just finished Mansfield Park yesterday, so today I'm starting Northanger Abbey. Almost done making my way through these Austen books. 😊

With family coming soon for an extended visit, I wanted my current read to be a short one; and I'm also interested in expanding the very scanty amount of contemporary general fiction I've read over the years. (I've tended to be more drawn to older classics.) So I opted for Dead Poets Society by N.H. Kleinbaum. (It will also fit into a challenge I'm doing in a couple of groups.) Although it's a movie novelization, I've never seen the original film myself.

Although the novella Wolf Moon by Ed Gorman is incorporated in its entirety in the anthology that I'm currently reading, A Century of Great Western Stories, the fact that it was originally published by itself in book format seemed to me to entitle it to be counted (and reviewed) as a read in its own right. (The book pictured above was bulked up by the addition of another Gorman story as a bonus; that's apparently what explains the much higher page count.)

This month, I'm taking part in another group's common read of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although I've started late. As the first major poetry collection in the Romantic style to be published in England, this book has a landmark significance in British literature, despite its relatively short length. (I'm reading it in the 1969 edition of the Oxford Univ. Press printing, edited by W. J. B. Owen of Canada's McMaster Univ.)

Currently reading my last Austen novel, Persuasion. It's a very slow start, so I hope it gets better and captures my attention soon!