Can an artist single-handedly impact an entire city? Considering that the city in question is Rome, probably not. But add to the mix an influential politician and you have a recipe for success. Loyd Grossman’s book, The Artist and the Eternal City, charts the path of Gian Lorenzo Bernini through the streets of Rome.
If last year was weird, this one is even weirder. I completely missed the beginning of the #20BooksofSummer2021 challenge and joined mid-course, with some books already under my belt, thankfully it was not a stressful thing. Now I am late for the closing party. I decided to aim for 20 books this year since last …
Continue reading 20 Books of Summer 2021 – Belated Summary – #20BooksofSummer21
Back in February I posted about rediscovering an old hobby: knitting and crocheting. The madness continues, so in the past few months I managed to finish quite a few pieces. I ventures into more shawls and discovered the world of pillows, but then it came time for really challenging projcest: the blankets! While the patterns …
It has been a while since a book annoyed me so much! And yet I could not find a flaw in Harris’ argument. There is nothing more irritating than knowing you disagree with someone’s claim, but not being able to fight their arguments. I still have the niggling feeling there is a fundamental flaw somewhere …
Al-Andalus is the forgotten heritage of the Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula. A thriving educational center where the Muslims, Jews and Christians were able to coexist in relative peace for almost 800 years. It is a period of European history that is rarely mentioned and if it is then only briefly. Yet it left …
What happens when the perfect world of a planned community clashes with the messiness of the reals world? Can we really shield ourselves from chaos with a set of rules for living? Can racism be denied out of a community? Little Fires Everywhere asks those fundamental questions in a serious but often also lightly satirical …
My only explanation why I read this classic of sci-fi only now is that I rarely dabbed in the sci-fi space. Recently this has started slowly changing and when someone recommends a book to me I tend to try it and usually with a good outcome. It was the same with this one. A book …
This is such a weird year! I’m so out of kilter with where we are in terms of time that I completely missed the beginning of the 20 Books of Summer! That’s a first. So here I am jumping on the bandwagon mid-course. Cathy at 746Books is our wonderful host and she is doing an …
Dive right into the heart of Cuba with this collection of seven short stories.
Short and sweet like a short story, here are a few quotes from Jigs&Reels by Joanne Harris A change of costume here, of location there: stories do not die, but are simply reincarnated every generation or so into a different time and idiom - from Fule’s Gold I cried at the unfairness of it all: …
