Rebecca Reads

Today I welcome Wilkie Collins to my blog through the Classics Circuit.
Although I like reading classics, I don’t know much. Before August of this year, I’d never heard of Wilkie Collins! I first experienced Wilkie Collins through The Woman in White (loved it!), and I recently read The Moonstone.
For this Circuit, I decided to read [...]

My experiences with Victorian novels had been quite positive, so I jumped in to read a few more. I enjoyed both The Moonstone and North and South very much.
I did give up on A Tale of Two Cities this week. While Oliver Twist seemed intuitive and easy to breeze through, Two Cities has been confusing, [...]

Late one evening in 1849, art teacher Walter Hartwright walks from his mother’s home in suburban London into the city. He meets a mysterious woman wearing white on his path, and he helps her to the city. The next day, he travels to his new employment in Limmeridge House, the Lake District, to teach the [...]

I was looking for a light-hearted mystery to fill the requirement for my library summer reading program, and The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King certainly fit the bill. I’m glad I read it.
Mary Russell is an astute young woman residing in the World War I British countryside when she meets her neighbor, a retired middle-aged [...]

In Possession, A.S. Byatt powerfully creates characters so believable that I found myself assuming that the events she writes of really happened, that the feelings described were truly felt, and that the characters actually lived.
For me, Possession’s strength lies in this powerful creation. While I enjoyed the developing action (it is a literary mystery) and [...]

In my mind, Edgar Allan Poe is the most well-known Halloween-ish short story writer. To keep with the season, I reread some of Poe’s short stories. I enjoyed his stories when I was younger – I even rewrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a play for my high school’s Halloween “one-act plays.” [...]

I’ve been in a short story mood lately. I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (a collection of 18 of the 49 stories about Father Brown) when I saw it on a display at the library. I’d read somewhere, maybe on a book blog, that one should read Father Brown because it’s the definitive [...]

Favorite Authors
When I was a child, I would go to the library on my bike with a backpack full of already-consumed books, return them, and get another full backpack full of to-be-read books. Sometimes I’d go through a series, reading every single one as they were available at the library. Other times I went through [...]