By a Gentlemen of the Temple.
While cynic Charles still trimm’d the vane
‘Twixt Querouaille and Castlemaine,
In days that shocked John Evelyn,
My First Possessor fix’d me in.
In days of Dutchmen and of frost,
The narrow sea with James I cross’d,
Returning when once more began
The Age of Saturn and of Anne.
I am a part of all the past;
I knew the Georges, first and last;
I have been oft where else was none
Save the great wig of Addison;
And seen on shelves beneath me grope
The little eager form of Pope.
I lost the Third that own’d me when
French Noailles fled at Dettingen;
The year James WOLFE supris’d Quebec
The Fourth in hunting broke his neck;
The day that William Hogarth dy’d,
The Fifth one found me in Cheapside.
This was a Scholar, one of those
Whose Greek is sounder than their hose;
He lov’d old Books and nappy ale,
So liv’d at Streatham, next to Thrale.
‘Twas there this stain of grease I boast
Was made by Dr. Johnson’s toast.
(He did it, as I think, for Spite;
My Master call’d him Jacobite!)
And now that I so long to-day
Have rested post discrimina,
Safe in the brass-wir’d book-case where
I watch’d the Vicar’s whit’ning hair,
Must I these travell’d bones inter
In some Collector’s sepulchre!
Must I be torn from hence and thrown
With frontispiece and colophon!
With vagrant E’s, and I’s, and O’s,
The spoil of plunder’d Folios!
With scraps and snippets that to Me
Are naught but kitchen company!
Nay, rather, Friend, this favour grant me:
Tear me at once; but don’t transplant me.
Cheltenham. Sep 31, 1792.
I’ve been reading this book for nearly a year and a half. You know those books, usually fiction or memoir, that you pick up which ring so true in your life that you can’t put it down while at the same time you don’t want to pick it up? It’s just too much. Something about it makes you sad, you cry at every other chapter, there’s some kind of emotional involvement that you can’t avoid. Wild Mind didn’t create such sadness for me; it created frustration. I wanted to get through Goldberg’s writing memoir, I wanted to see what hint towards better writing she’d throw out next, but this book guided me through a year of discovering my purpose in writing, and it wasn’t until I graduated the course that I could finish the last fifty pages or so and move on to whatever’s next. 
Eoin Colfer gained his fame by writing the popular series Artemis Fowl about a twelve year old criminal mastermind. He’s written several other non-series books including The Wish List, about a teenage girl named Meg Finn who is killed and must help someone she attempted to rob in order to find her place in Heaven, and Half Moon Investigations, a non-fantasy novel about a 12 year old who is an online graduate of a private detective academy. Most recently, Colfer has released an authorized addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” called And Another Thing… 
This book was written either by someone who really loved Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and found great inspiration from those and other magical books when he decided to write this, someone who really hated Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and decided to show the world how ridiculously easy it is to write a magical adventure book, or doesn’t really care one way or the other and wanted to make a pretty penny because those books are popular and someone might pick it up and not care that it’s annoyingly similar. No, really, without knowing much background about the author or his motivations for the book (and I’m too lazy to look into it, feel free to do the research for me and comment :P), it’s too similar to not be intentional one way or the other. I just can’t tell if it’s a tribute or mockery.
All right, I won’t lie. The book started off really slowly, and I admit I wanted to put it down several times. It got to the point, even, where I just wanted to set it aside alltogether, thinking that if it wasn’t going to pick up the pace that I didn’t really want to spend precious novel-planning time reading it. I’m very glad that I continued, though, to read what turned out to be a spectacularly written composition about love, longing, and loss.
By all accounts and appearances, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks should be a beautifully received masterpiece about the plauge in 17th century England. In a small Derbyshire village, residents begin to die from this horrid disease, described in such detail as to make the reader fully aware of the devastation. Michael Mompellion, the rector, pursues a plan to shut off all communication outside the village, save the slight contact needed for gaining of supplies and food for life, to thus inhibit the infection of surrounding villages with this plague. Some disagree.
I cannot lie that the spine of this book is precisely what drew my attention to it. I have never been “ashamed” that I judge books by their covers – that is to say, I buy books based on their covers. Once read, the cover has little to do with my opinion, though I may make commentary on the appropriateness of it. I also cannot say that I am usually disappointed by my selection; books that look like [old] books are generally about books, or other literary things, and I tend to enjoy those. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox was no exception.
