6/30/2023 0 Comments A prayer for owen meany amazonA Prayer For Owen Meany was an exception. As I work my way through the Top 100 BBC Reads, fewer titles are familiar, thus I go to friends, family and fellow bloggers for suggestions that they might think I’ll enjoy. Since beginning my blog, I’ve begun to rely heavily on others for book recommendations. A Prayer For Owen Meany is one of those rare finds. And for me, there are few things better in life than reading an utterly, utterly amazing book, which stays with you a long while after the final page. There have been low points as well as high I certainly haven’t enjoyed all of the books I’ve read as part of the challenge, but the positives of such a challenge certainly outweigh the negatives. I’ve previously spoken about the many books I may never have read, were it not for the fact that I was working my way through some of the best novels ever written. When I first challenged myself to reading the Top 100 BBC Reads, little did I know what was in store.
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I got to see firsthand how American music could surprise, delight, confound, and inspire. There was everything from Minimal Music to Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Influence on Serious Music, or Popular Music between the Wars. The topics were all over the map, often requested by the local presenters. In the early 1980s, I began to lecture in Europe on the music of my native America for the State Department. As America approaches its 250th birthday, American music continues to break boundaries, and forge paths to a new musical futureĪn Introduction to Boosey & Hawkes’ America at 250: A Programming Guide, by David Robertson Juliet Shelby is the daughter of Rose, Viscountess Shelby, who is, unfortunately, the vainest of the Featherstone sisters. The heroine of How to Romance a Rake, a tremendously appealing character, is not your conventional Regency miss. I came up with the Fabulous Featherstone sisters and out of that grew their daughters, the Ugly Ducklings. I did a “what if” and wondered what it would be like to be the daughter of such a famed beauty–especially a daughter who suffers by comparison. They were real life Regency characters who came from no-one knows where and took the ton by storm with their beauty and married very, very well. The concept of three cousins who are considered ugly compared to their glamorous mothers grew out of a story I read somewhere about the famous Gunning Sisters. Can you tell us a little bit about it and what inspired the premise? Your series is called The Ugly Ducklings. Let’s have a chat with Manda, and see what she’s up to with her latest book, How To Romance A Rake. Her first book, How to Dance With a Duke, debuted to great reviews and spent several weeks on the Bookscan bestseller list. Mandy writes witty and charming Regency-set historical romance with a dash of mystery. I’m thrilled to have my good friend and talented historical romance author Manda Collins on the blog today. This novel is Bradbury's most extensive treatment of the reality of evil. Here, all of his imaginative powers are unleashed to produce an eerie, even nightmarish, novel in which the powers of evil are made manifest through the arrival of the Cooger and Dark Carnival in Green Town, Illinois. Something Wicked This Way Comes evolved as a direct result of this fondness for carnivals. Undaunted, though, he returned to re-observe the circus banner which, for him, in spite of his catastrophe, had lost none of its excitement. Once, as a lad, he was so enthralled by a red and yellow circus banner that he fell down a window pit, shattered one of the glass panes, and crashed into a cellar barbershop. Bradbury readily admits that he has always loved carnivals, magicians, mind readers, and skeletons. |