First off, I have not read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice(though I’ll get to it one day), which means I am not able to make comparisons. This book is set in 2017 in this boarding school in Germany where our main protagonist, Emma fins this magical book that lets her do her bidding. Now this is my first issue, Emma. Emma, despite how much I want to like her as a character, I really struggled to connect with her. She sort of the typical, whiny teenage girl who has gotten pretty much whatever she wanted. She’s also really beautiful. Now, when she finds this book, instead of throwing it away like a sensible person does because of the magical powers, she instead uses it to her own purposes for a good chunk of the book, doing whatever she wanted with people, which just makes it very uncool. My reaction: I was on the fence for the first 5 or 6 chapters of this book, but really ended up enjoying it (and polishing it off in a day!). Initially I kept trying to figure out which character was supposed to represent which Austen character (as I knew the book was Austen-inspired) and I was seeing all the parallels. This was kind of distracting for me, especially considering that it pulled from both Emma and Pride & Prejudice, which seemed discordant, since it wasn't following one story or the other, but a mishmash. Ahoy there me mateys! I wanted to read this book ever since I saw the wonderful cover. I requested it from NetGalley as an eArc and was denied. And then I kept forgetting about this book (Hardy har har!). But no matter, I have finally managed to read this and I am glad that I did. Gleichzeitig versucht sie auch etwas über Darcys Schwester Gina zu erfahren, die vier Jahre zuvor verschwunden ist. Dabei kommen sich Darcy und Emma näher, doch das macht Darcy auch nicht sympathischer. Glaubt Emma zumindest... He has a wonderful voice, and an incredible life: he was born in Romania, came to England, was published by the Woolfs, went to the US, worked in the grain industry for a while but got bored and teamed up with Orson Welles – as you do…”

How to Find a Book Without Knowing the Title or Author - MUO

You’ve got this young doctor working in 18th-century Lymington. He is interested in philosophy and the way of the world at a time when most things were still unknown. Doctors didn’t know all the things they needed to know to cure people. He befriends an older doctor, and they meet regularly to have philosophical chats, and these philosophical chats are in the book. He is also introduced to a woman, who is probably in her 30s, who has bought a big house in Lymington. She suggests that they have a ‘conversation.’ Why do you think discovering a ‘lost classic’ tends to feel so much more significant, more moving, than simply discovering a great new book? Best aspect: The fantastical, magical aspect of the story. The premise of a book that makes whatever is written in it come true was explored in interesting (and sometimes bittersweet) ways. I loved the connection to fairy tales and folklore, and the messages in this story about the power of words, and the danger of trying to make wishes come true (that could end up having unforeseen consequences!). It certainly showed magic to be a double-edged sword. Plus, the whole idea of this magical book totally gave me Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets vibes!There’s a very famous episode, which you can see on YouTube, in which he goes to Ringwood Market. It must be the mid-1970s and there’s an old woman who, every week, brings three pats of butter to Ringwood Market, and she sells her pats of butter, and then goes home. That’s in the centre of Ringwood. Now it’s probably got a McDonald’s and an HMV and a Waterstones, right there in the spot she once was. Part of you thinks, ‘Is the mum sleeping with her son? She might be, I’m not sure,’ and it makes you feel mildly uncomfortable. It’s presented as odd. Actually, thinking about it again now – and this is going to sound awful, but I don’t mean the incestuous bit, just the overall dysfunctional, weird, rich family – you could probably replace everyone’s surname with Trump. It would make sense. Rich, dysfunctional families are always great value. He talks about his wartime experiences, growing up in the countryside, what it was like working in television in the 1960s and 70s, and it’s full of amazing folklore. He says that when he was young, you could tell what job a man did in the countryside by how he walked. The ploughman walked with a wobble, because all day long he had one foot in the trough and one foot on the higher ground. The book is full of these little anecdotes. His mission – and I suppose this is true of the other books on my list – was to try to preserve things that were going to be forgotten. Two hundred years ago, one fleet of colony ships left planet Earth and began a settlement on Proxima Centauri. But no. Because of this reference, and the name choices, I really thought this would be a much closer retelling of Pride and Prejudice than it actually was. So if you're expecting a P&P retelling, stop right there. It's not. It has elements of it, and it's certainly influenced by it, and if you love the love story between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy (or even Jane and Bingley, which have their respective characters as well, and whose romance I also enjoyed), then you'll probably like this enemies-to-lovers romance as well - but it is, in my opinion, not a 'retelling'.

book you read? These sites can help! Forgot the title of a book you read? These sites can help!

But The Rationalist is wonderful. There was a follow-up called The Marriage of Souls(1990), and then there was a third book that never got published. It was intended as a trilogy. There’s a certain romance to the idea that here was this, at the time, very popular and well-received book, and for whatever reason, the third and final instalment never came out. There may well be people who read the first and second books and loved them.Earth Unknown” is the first novel in the “Forgotten Earth” series and was released in 2018. A horrible discovery, and a secret which could destroy all of human civilization. Desperately escaping to the most dangerous planet in the whole universe: Earth. Eccentric is the word. It’s that sort of multi-generational novel, set in a rich family. If you went completely down the commercial side, you could rewrite it as a soap opera, but it’s not intended that way, it’s written in quite a literary style. Handl has an interesting, odd voice. It’s disconcerting, actually. It feels like a 1960s take on a classic – almost as if someone has taken the morals and loose sensibilities of the ’60s and applied them to something that was written in 1910. It’s mannered, and every character is despicable and horrible; it’s like the Forsyte Sagabut everyone is vile and able to talk about sex and relationships in a way that people couldn’t when the Forsyte Saga was written. It’s really peculiar, an acquired taste.

Language - Forgotten Books Language - Forgotten Books

Keep us posted on that one, please. Now, though, let’s move onto the non-fiction portion of your list. Tell me about John Houseman’s Unfinished Business: A Memoir (1986). Worldbuilding/Magic system - THE DARK ACADEMIA VIBES ARE REAL IN THIS ONE UHH!! I loved Stolenzburg so much it was such a delight If you have read it: did I miss something, or did the storyline involving ( the niece Marie) get totally dropped?In their English-language editions, the books were greatly helped by early championing from Stephen King, usefully himself a populist novelist notably interested in meta-fiction, with many of his books involving writers tormented by their readers, characters or pseudonyms. And in the UK in particular, The Shadow of the Wind seems to have arrived at an opportune time. While the sought-after book that speaks secret volumes is a long-standing literary device (including in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, a clear influence on Ruiz Zafón), it’s striking how many of his contemporaries also wrote about secret or forbidden libraries. When it was published in English, suppressed knowledge was central to two of the biggest hits of that year: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. And the two dominant literary sequences of the period – Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books – both feature significant sinister archives: the Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork and the roped-off Dark Arts section of the Hogwarts school library. By 2007, when Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief itself became another global hit, books within books had become a hugely lucrative publishing sub-genre. For Spain, the four books dramatise the lingering shadow of the Spanish civil war and the dictatorship of General Franco. Ruiz Zafón, who was 11 when Franco died, grew up in a Spain that would become a constitutional monarchy, a member of the EU, an ally of the US in Iraq – but increasingly struggled to hold on to Catalonia. In common with the best historical novelists, he wrote about his own times through older ones. The lost, lamented and redacted stories that form the spine of the quartet reflect the long historical willingness of the Spanish state, and its partner the Catholic church, to silence writers and writing. Emma discovers an ancient tome in her boarding school's abandoned library and soon finds that everything written in it comes true. Whether she likes it or not, the things she writes can't be un-written (believe her, she's tried to cross them out), and while some situations she finds herself in are unbelievable (like the lion in the middle of the forest in Germany), some are very gruesome. When a flip comment affects the health of those around her she starts to take it more seriously. Darcy is in this one, and while Emma doesn't have any siblings, she does have best friends at boarding school that fill the Jane and Charlotte roles. It sounds like the sort of thing that a major publishing house these days would pass on – it’s seedy and weird. It sounds like the sort of thing that would go down well with fans of the present strand of nature writing – there’s a Robert Macfarlane-ish twinge.