The following is a guest post by Thomas Lopinski, author of The Art of Raising Hell. If you would like to write a guest post on my blog, please send me an e-mail at contact@cecilesune.com I didn’t sit down to write a novel entitled The Art of Raising Hell. In fact, the book was already finished and half way edited by the time my dear friend suggested it. We’d been going…
Tag: book
Ray Bradbury Quotation
“A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.” – Ray Bradbury.
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Fault in Our Stars is the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, an empathetic 16-year-old girl with thyroid cancer. She has been battling the illness since the age of 12, and a new drug seems to have stopped the cancer’s progress. She needs to be hooked to an oxygen tank though to help her breathe, and she totes the device wherever she goes. However, illness has isolated her, and she spends…
Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin
In Hide and Seek, the second book in the Inspector Rebus series, a young man is discovered dead from an apparent overdose in a shady part of Edinburgh. John Rebus takes on the case, but discovers troubling evidence that points to a murder: the body is found laid out cross-like between two candles, a five-pointed star has been drawn on the wall above, the body is covered in bruises, and…
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Awards, drew my attention because I usually enjoy historical fiction, and I have always been fascinated by the gold rush and how people would risk everything they have in the odd chance of striking it rich. The book starts when 12 men meet on 27 January 1866 in the smoking room of a hotel to…
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
The books I have gone through lately have dealt with serious stuff, so I needed something lighter to read for the holidays. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding came out a few months ago, and I thought it would be a good time to go through the whole series again. For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years and haven’t…
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
I arrived an hour early at Southminster United Church in Ottawa on Tuesday 24 September 2013. Already there was a line for the event One on One with Margaret Atwood. Before getting to my seat, I was given 4 buttons: “Margaret Atwood MaddAddam: See the Future, Seek the Truth”. This was the first time I was handed a gift at a literary event. I thought this was a great souvenir,…
My Black Friday Purchases…
Because I am book obsessed, my Black Friday purchases weren’t clothes or shoes or jewelry… but books, books and more books! Look at these beautiful works of art! Notice the colorful covers and spines! I think they will look right at home on my shelves! Did I mention they were 75% off? Here is a list of my acquisitions: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland The Virgin…
Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin was in Ottawa on Saturday 30 November 2013 to talk about his new book, Saints of the Shadow Bible. Earlier that day, he was having a drink in a pub when he started chatting with one of the customers there. The guy noticed that he was Scottish, and asked Rankin what he was doing for a living. When the author told him, the guy said he was actually…
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood, the second book in the MaddAddam trilogy, came out 6 years after Oryx and Crake in 2009. It is not a sequel, but rather a companion to the first novel as it takes place on a concurrent time. Toby and Ren survived the epidemic that killed most of the human race. A series of flashbacks informs us that Toby was a therapist in a spa…