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How to Make an Animal Speak

by Jack Martin on January 24, 2012

Charlotte spins her web, Wilbur shows up the other pigs at the County Fair, and young readers rejoice. They don’t even seem to care that animals can’t talk. Why do kids get to have all the fun? After spending week after week writing online book reviews on stories about normal people that speak to other [...]

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The other night I pulled my 800 page copy of Middlemarch out of my denim hobo bag and set it down on the table where those I was hanging out with promptly marveled at its heft.  I told my friends that I had recently decided to read Middlemarch once a year and was in the [...]

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Hot Scribble: 10 Greatest First Lines of Literature

by The Reader on December 8, 2011

Whenever I’m on the fence about buying a book, I turn to page 1 and read its opening line. Considering the amount of time authors spend obsessing over the first words of their tome, you’d think all openings would be amazing. And yet, they’re not. Constructing an original, provocative opening sentence is eons harder than [...]

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10 Top Villains of Literature

by The Reader on November 30, 2011

Sinister villains often make good books – after all, it is frequently in the defeat of such adversaries that heroes prove heroic. For this reason, one could make a Top 10 Heroes List that closely mirrors that of the villains – and wind up including Pip, Hamlet, Charles Darnay and Uncle Tom among others. A [...]

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The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on August 18, 2008

Wilkie Collins may have penned this thriller long ago in 1868, but I have to say just like most thrillers when it winds up, it winds up! The novel actually starts out pretty strong and intriguing, the premise helping immensely that a mysterious, very large diamond (not an actual moonstone) is given to a young [...]

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