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At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs
I recently finished reading At the Earth’s Core (1914) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This is the first of the Pellucidar novels, a series that went on to include seven books in which the protagonist David Innes and others explore a Hollow Earth setting. Reading this was a classic ERB experience. Action, adventure, creatively imagined creatures,…
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Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol
A book jot from February, 2021: I finished reading Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Peter Constantine. This is an unusual book. It follows the titular character and his two sons, Cossacks from the historical past, in the 16th or 17th century. It reads almost like an epic folktale, with beautiful passages of descriptive…
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The Hard Switch by Owen D. Pomery
I finished reading The Hard Switch (2023), a graphic novel written and illustrated by Owen D. Pomery. It’s a science fiction tale set in a world in which interstellar travel has long been an established reality thanks to a mineral called alcanite. However, the end of such travel is fast approaching, as the finite galactic…
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The Arctic Prairies by Ernest Thompson Seton
I just finished reading The Arctic Prairies (1911) by Ernest Thompson Seton. This memoir is an account of a six month journey by canoe Seton took into northern Canada in 1907. Seton was an artist, writer, and naturalist who undertook the trip in hopes of finding bison and caribou and, in his words, “the chances…
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Alone by Megan E. Freeman
I just finished reading Alone (2021) by Megan E. Freeman, a young adult novel in free verse. It is narrated by a young girl, 12 years old in the beginning, who finds herself in a very serious survival situation after waking to find herself completely cut off from human contact. It is an extremely compelling…
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Eleodes armata, tree forts, and snowballs
A while ago, I thought our little beetle friend in the terrarium, a beautiful Eleodes armata, must have died. I had watered the terrarium pretty thoroughly and this usually brought him out from his subterranean refuge. This time, however, he made no appearance. Inspecting the terrarium, I thought I saw a dark beetle carcase and…