So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling. But I have never thought that traits that are [...]
Talking about David Copperfield today at book club, we wondered which character in the book we’d most like to be. Not any of the women, although Peggotty was one of my faves. A few said they’d want to be David who, though he suffers, does grow (and ‘learn discipline’) and ends up well. Today [...]
That’s the chapter title from which this excerpt from David Copperfield comes. Though Dickens writes hecka long stories, the basic characterizations are tight and—wow!—effective. Peggoty, Uriah Heep, on and on. I cut away lots of secondary characters in my last manuscript because they took too much space in the story. Copperfield is a textbook in [...]
Nicola Cornick’s latest historical fiction novel, Unmasked, is available as an “enriched edition” e-book at eharlequin.com. Harlequin promo: Have you ever read something in a novel and wished you could see a picture, find a definition, or learn more about it without having to look it up? Now you can! This special electronic book is [...]
Due to my Sharpe fixation in August, I now have only four weeks to read the entirety of David Copperfield before we meet up for book club. From “I am born” through “A last retrospect” is 715 pages in my Barnes & Noble Classics edition. Turns out, though, this is a perfect time for Dickens’s [...]
In the past six weeks, I’ve blown through more than 20 of the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell (holding off on the 1820-set one to use as incentive to meet my page goals this month). Wow. Rollicking adventure, tight serial plotting and continuing characters who grow (somewhat). I read them in historical order, marveling [...]
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org
