Speaking of The Mousetrap, here is a Tom Stoppard anecdote. If you have never seen The Mousetrap and you don’t know whodunit and you don’t want to, don’t carry on reading this paragraph. You have been warned. Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of The Mousetrap and those country house type mysteries, and it’s also a parody of theatre critics. And it steals lots of plot elements from The Mousetrap, as the title The Real Inspector Hound suggests, which might have caused the Mousetrap people to object. But! But but but! They couldn’t! Because if they…
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They finished their preparations for the night, took a small snack and decided it was safe to wander back into the Great Hall again to look at their Angel. “I wish I could hug her,” Claudia whispered. “They probably bugged her already. Maybe that light is part of the alarm. Better not touch. You’ll set it off.” “I said ‘hug,’ not ‘bug!’ Why would I want to bug her?” “That makes more sense than to hug her.” “Silly. Shows how much you know. When you hug someone, you learn something else about them. An important something else.” Jamie shrugged his…
3 CommentsSo today’s Booking Through Thursday question made me smile: I saw that National Library week is coming up in April, and that led to some questions. How often do you use your public library and how do you use it? Has the coffeehouse/bookstore replaced the library? Did you go to the library as a child? Do you have any particular memories of the library? Do you like sleek, modern, active libraries or the older, darker, quiet, cozy libraries? Oh, how often I use my public library. I use my public library to cheer myself up whenever I am depressed. The…
6 CommentsBut the Royal Shakespeare Company is making a DVD of David Tennant’s Hamlet! YES THEY ARE. A DVD. And, okay, yes, Hamlet is not historically my most favorite one of Shakespeare’s plays. I have been known to say that Hamlet needs to for God’s sake DO SOMETHING ANYTHING EVER; I have been known to quote Oscar Wilde about critics of Hamlet; I have been known to tell the story of how my senior English class drove any possible liking I might ever have had for that play out of me by spending days and days and teacher-sanctioned days discussing whether…
5 CommentsMy university’s book fair came round again. Last year I bought a number of books, and felt very happy about it, but last year was not the same, for two main reasons. One, I didn’t have as much money to spend at the book bazaar last year; and two, I didn’t have an empty bookshelf to fill last year. This year I had a bunch of money budgeted for it, and I was also recently given an empty bookshelf. It’s sitting at work waiting to be taken home. All empty. I went three times on Thursday, because I had the…
5 CommentsHoly God, how have I lived my life without Joan Wyndham? I’m reading the first volume of her diaries that she kept during World War II, Love Lessons, and I am seriously thinking about stealing this book from the library and keeping it forever. (I won’t though of course.) She charms me. Poor darling Jo, I don’t love him a bit but I am divinely happy playing the fool with him. I know I shouldn’t, because he keeps saying, ‘Oh what an absolute bugger, oh you little bitch!’ We do sometimes reach the farthest point of passion after which coition…
Leave a CommentUpdate: Okay! I am sending books to mindy, Colleen, Kate, Darby, Anastasia, and Stacie. I’ve emailed y’all, but leave another comment if you didn’t get my email. I’ve heard some good things about John Bellairs, but when I tried one of his books once, I didn’t finish it because I wasn’t hugely in love with it. A little while ago, I found several of his books at the library sale for ten cents. So I got them. Why not? If it turns out I hate them, I thought, they were only ten cents. No big loss. Since then I have…
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