Feb 28
2005
For a state that I associate mostly with soy bean farming and Biodiesel, Minnesota is peculiarly rich in Wordcandy goodness. A surprising number of famous American authors (Garrison Keillor, Laur...
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Feb 13
2005
Comic book writer and artist Bill Willingham has achieved Wordcandy-status based on the sheer awesomeness of Fables: Legends in Exile, his current series for Vertigo. In Willingham's Fabletown, a...
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Feb 13
2005
It is rare for me to recommend a writer of historical romances that feature a pre-Regency setting. I'm sure that there are plenty of very entertaining books out there with medieval or Elizabetha...
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Jan 24
2005
Wilkie Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, and his books, while less famous, share many of Dickens’s strengths. (Collins was also less of a tool on the personality front, apparently.) ...
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Jan 24
2005
Like A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, Scottish author Sir J. M. Barrie's most famous work walks a fine line between preciousness and genuine fun--and manages, most of the time, to keep its ba...
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Jan 24
2005
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
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Jan 13
2005
Please note: the plot of Diana Wynne Jones's novel Deep Secret is convoluted, the characters are slow to develop, and Jones's conception of magic is not the usual whiz-bang Harry Potter-style acti...
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Dec 21
2004
Son of an Irish ear and eye doctor and a flamboyant nationalistic poet, Oscar Wilde is best known for his deliciously giddy plays "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "An Ideal Husband". His oth...
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Dec 7
2004
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the very few "important" mid-to-late 20th century writers whose books are not, actually, complete downers. That's not to say that his books don't have their emotionally se...
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Nov 29
2004
Rumiko Takahashi is the creator of four long-running, influential, and insanely entertaining manga series--Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, and InuYasha Sengoku o Togi Zoshi--as well as a h...
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Nov 29
2004
Charlaine Harris is the writer of the Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard mysteries, as well as the extremely successful Sookie Stackhouse supernatural romance/suspense series, about a telepathic barma...
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Nov 29
2004
Where did Cynthia Heimel go, anyway? She disappeared after the release of her 2002 book, Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It’s Personal (that would be the one with the cover featuring a wom...
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Nov 14
2004
With cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, all roads seem to lead back to Bloom County. As the writer and illustrator of Bloom County, Outland, and now Opus, as well as a handful of children's books, alm...
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Nov 14
2004
Susan Juby is the author of Alice, I Think and its sequel, Miss Smithers, a hilarious and deeply bizarre series of teen books about a young Canadian misanthrope with ten less-than-successful years...
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Nov 4
2004
When Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse That Roared first appeared as a serialized story in the 1950s, I'm sure the idea of the United States being invaded by a tiny nation armed with ridiculously inadequate weapons was just too precious. Unfortunately, in a post-9/11, box-cutter-filled world, some of the central jokes in this story hit pretty close to home...
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Nov 3
2004
According to the Internet, novelist Dorothy Gilman's real last name is "Butters". Now, while I can see that "Dorothy Butters" may not scream "hardboiled suspense writer", I think that it is the p...
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Nov 3
2004
Terry Pratchett is like God's gift to fantasy fans. Some of his books might blend a bit together, but Pratchett is witty (capable of making puns funny--it's true! Yes, it can be done!) and he ca...
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Oct 17
2004
Jasper Fforde is the author of a series of dazzlingly silly and imaginative alternate universe/adventure/detective stories, including The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, ...
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Oct 7
2004
T. H. White is the author of 1958's The Once and Future King, a "novel" (actually a collection of four of his earlier books) that begins with the education of the young King Arthur and ends with h...
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Sep 16
2004
If your only experience with Charles Dickens's books is reading A Tale of Two Cities for your high school literature class, you aren't doing him justice. I am sorry to say that after that truly e...
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Aug 19
2004
Short, sweet, and witty, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs was the 1912 equivalent of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries books. Webster's heroine, 18-year-old orphan Judy Abbott, is stunned to discover t...
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Aug 19
2004
Despite being the author of the totally awesome The Phantom Tollbooth, the geek classic The Dot and the Line, and a handful of other bizarre-but-amazing kids' books, Norton Juster's focus has rema...
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Aug 19
2004
Nora Roberts doesn't always live up to her full potential, but she is one of contemporary fiction's most consistently intelligent and entertaining writers. While it seems like she puts out a doze...
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Aug 17
2004
It’s not that Meg Cabot’s most recent young adult novel Teen Idol is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a clever, entertaining, and occasionally thought-provoking read. If Teen Idol had been written by an unknown author, I would have been thrilled to discover it and immediately passed it around to all of my friends...
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Aug 14
2004
If one were to judge the British population by the diary entries of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, or Louise Rennison’s Georgia Nicholson, it would be pretty easy to a...
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Aug 14
2004
Elizabeth Von Armin’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April is one of the most soothing books I have ever read. The story is simple: four very different Englishwomen respond to an advertisement for a mo...
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Aug 14
2004
I thought that Jennifer Weiner’s first book, the bestselling Good in Bed, was pretty good. I was bored by the angsty absentee-father plotline and rolled my eyes at the melodramatic ending, but st...
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Aug 14
2004
American readers may be surprised to learn that P.G. Wodehouse (creator of the British icon Jeeves, the penultimate "gentleman's gentleman") is actually quite the figure of controversy in Great Br...
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Aug 14
2004
In my more clear-eyed moments, I can tell that L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series is her best work--unlike the majority of her other books, the Anne series balances her sentimental ten...
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Aug 14
2004
I have no idea who makes this kind of decision, but whoever decided that the late, great Edward Gorey should provide the cover art for Sarah Caudwell's books was an absolute genius. Their styles ...
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