Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Rusalka is a kitten!
This little ball of tortitude is the newest addition to our family. We’re still getting to know her, but we do know that she’s very talkative and doesn’t like to be alone. She was adopted at ten weeks old in September 2020 and is the youngest cat in our household.
Rusalka is a tortoiseshell kitten, with beautifully brindled fur.
They are clothbound and beautiful with the perfect size of margins and type. Both books nestle into a sturdy slipcase with gold type and a full colour illustration of Sawyer tricking one of his peers into doing his chore for him, painted by Norman Rockwell.
What I really loved about this diary was the sheer number of random facts that I learned about the late 18th century. Things like when umbrellas first came into use, or the fact that sometimes visits and dinners were postponed due to the lack of a moon to illuminate the roads.
The Middle Parts of Fortune was published anonymously in 1929, only to be censored and re-issued as Her Privates We in 1930. I’m always on the lookout for good fiction around WWI, so I was excited to find this book on one of our trips to a small used bookstore for my birthday a few months ago.
It turns the audience into an eavesdropper, listening to thoughts said aloud when a character is alone.
Don’t Read This! features scary stories from authors of diverse backgrounds from Zimbabwe to Japan to Spain. The stories strike many different notes as well from very scary to nearly humorous.
It’s surprising that her name seems mostly lost to time — like the grand majority female writers of the Victorian era. What makes it more of a tragedy in Oliphant’s case is that her work is quite good — even better than a lot of writers whose names I’ve seen on the more mainstream ghost story anthologies.
Tišma makes death a haunting presence, coming in and out of focus, receding and approaching. It is always there and always palpable, and is never far away.
The play is three acts and at its core is about lost potential and the regrets that follow it. To some extent it is also about the corruption and power dynamics that can flourish in academia.
Orwell and the Dispossessed takes the reader beyond 1984 and Animal Farm and emphasizes that Orwell was a diverse and talented writer that had a lot to say and cut the reader to core at the same time as making them think.
The Other is full of twists and turns and proceeds along at a fast pace — so fast that I could easily read it in the course of a long afternoon and evening.
