![]() ![]() The pages in the navigation bar and sidebar gadget are specific to those particular areas of my life and include direct links to featured "articles." I hope the information I've shared here will continue to reconnect me with friends from my past, aid people with shared ancestry, supply tips to those considering downsizing and digitizing their lives, provide images and information to those with descendants of my horses, give people more plant-based food ideas, and help people decide to try a book I've reviewed or music that I've highlighted. It's my place to put those words I struggle to find and the memories that are fading fast. VALEEHILL is purely a passion project for me. This specific iteration was established in 2008. My first use of the name online came in the late 1990s and its first use as a domain came in the early 2000s when I created my first website. The name VALEEHILL comes from shortening my entire name and has been around since 1980. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It was an act that Franz could never mention or else face a firing squad. What happened between them, the American 8th Air Force would later classify as ‘top secret’. This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day – the American – 2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown and the German – 2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler.Ī Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions and gives a dramatic account of the moment when they would stare across the frozen skies at one another. Suddenly a German Messerschmitt fighter pulled up on the bomber’s tail – the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger. At its controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. This instant Sunday Times bestseller tells the story of two fighter pilots whose remarkable encounter during the Second World War became the stuff of legend.įive days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. ![]() ![]() Yet nothing can prepare her for the ingenuity and influence it will take to become queen. ![]() Before she can journey from sunlit picnics with her sisters in Vienna to the glitter, glamour, and gossip of Versailles, Antonia must change everything about herself in order to be accepted as dauphine of France and the wife of the awkward teenage boy who will one day be Louis XVI. What she never anticipated was that the day in question would come so soon. When I am so clearly inadequate to my destiny? Raised alongside her numerous brothers and sisters by the formidable empress of Austria, ten-year-old Maria Antonia knew that her idyllic existence would one day be sacrificed to her mother's political ambitions. ![]() This enthralling confection of a novel, the first in a new trilogy, follows the transformation of a coddled Austrian archduchess into the reckless, powerful, beautiful queen Marie Antoinette. ![]() ![]() ![]() With some of these spellbinding and wickedly witchy books, witches are upfront and center, Hocus Pocus-style. ![]() Equally, we fear witches but we also fall madly in love with them.īelow, discover some of the best fiction and nonfiction books about witches to get you into the paranormal spirit. We find witches fascinating yet, society loves to hate and scapegoat them. Are you looking for wickedly witchy books? Discover the best books about witches for adults and teens.įrom witches grounded in a deep Wiccan past to whimsical beasties with powers and coming-of-age stories, witches take on many roles in modern-day literature.īooks about witches tend to focus on women versus men who are usually associated with warlocks and wizards. ![]() ![]() ![]() " I'd Rather Be Reading is a book lover's delight. ![]() The author of Reading People, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky. I'd Rather Be Reading is her winsome musings on books, not just as a way to enjoy a good story, but as a way to become a whole person."- Kathleen Grissom, author of The Kitchen House Anne Bogel is the creator of the popular blog Modern Mrs Darcy and the podcast What Should I Read Next? Her book lists and reading guides have established Bogel as a tastemaker among readers, authors, and publishers. I found myself-and my reading community-inside its pages, and you will too."- Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of The Almost Sisters "Personal and fun, Anne Bogel's essay collection is a self-portrait in books-weaving together all the readers she has been. "Anne Bogel's beguiling latest is a love letter to the reading life, infused with all the warmth, charm, and brilliance her fans have come to expect. In this collection of charming and relatable reflections, beloved blogger and author Anne Bogel leads you to remember the book that first hooked you, the place where you first fell in love with reading, and all the books and moments afterward that helped make you the reader you are today. ![]() They are part of who we are and we can't imagine life without them. ![]() "A book lover's delight."-Annie Spence, librarian and author of Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks Reading isn't just a way to pass the time-it's a lifestyle. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() MacLeish’s “Land of the Free,”įor instance, going directly to the matter with poetry and pictures-the matter being that the land is no longer free, having been mortgaged, bought and finally bankrupted by a succession of anonymous companies, banks, politicians andĬourts, or, for the present instance, Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America. Their themes of pity and anger, their styles of sentimental elegy and scarifying denunciation may come to seem representative of our time. Own land to find seeds of the same destructive hatred. Stirred like every other man in the street with news of foreign persecution, they turn to their They are looking at it again with revolutionary eyes. Each is writing stories and scenarios of America withĪ curious and sudden intensity, almost as if they had never seen or understood it before. ![]() Here are a few novelists writing as well as Steinbeck and perhaps a very few who write better but it is most interesting to note how very muchĪlike they are all writing: Hemingway, Caldwell, Faulkner, Dos Passos in the novel, and MacLeish in poetry are those whom we easily think of in their similarity of theme and style. John Steinbeck's New Novel Brims With Anger and PityĪpJohn Steinbeck's New Novel Brims With Anger and Pity By PETER MONRO JACK The Grapes of Wrath By John Steinbeck ![]() ![]() ![]() Afi does get a swish apartment in the capital city of Accra, complete with servants and more money than she’s ever had before.īut there’s one thing missing from this fairy tale – the husband. If this sounds too good to be true, you’re not far off the mark. Afi Tekple barely knows Elikem but the marriage will make her family financially secure and give her entry to the glitzy lifestyle she has dreamed of achieving. Instead of the usual scenario where the bride is forced to marry an older, gross, brute of a man (in the vein of The Girl With The Louding Voice), here we have a beautiful, but poor, young woman persuaded to marry the attractive, wealthy business man, Elikem Ganyo. In His Only Wife, Medie takes the idea of an arranged marriage and gives it a fresh twist. That lack of depth was, however, my major reservation about this novel, proving too much of a barrier to counteract all the aspects I did enjoy. It will definitely appeal to readers who enjoy a rags to riches story with a feminist twist but don’t want anything too heavy. ![]() The impressive list of accolades for His Only Wife suggest that Peace Ado Medie’s debut novel is a dazzling work of fiction from a bright new talent. ![]() ![]() Library Journal Best Fiction Book of 2020. ![]() ![]() ![]() Items in order will be sent via Express post as soon as they arrive in the warehouse. Order may come in multiple shipments, however you will only be charged a flat fee.Ģ-10 days after all items have arrived in the warehouse Items in order will be sent as soon as they arrive in the warehouse. ![]() Making new friends and letting go of old ones is never easy, but Ellen might just find a comfortable new place for herself if she can learn to embrace the fact that life doesn't always stick to a planned itinerary. Toss in a new nonbinary classmate whose identity has Ellen questioning her very binary way of seeing the world, homesickness, a scavenger hunt-style team project that takes the students through Barcelona to learn about Spanish culture and this trip is anything but what Ellen planned. A school trip to Barcelona seems like the perfect place for Ellen to get their friendship back on track.Įxcept it doesn't. ![]() But lately, Laurel has started making more friends, and cancelling more weekend plans with Ellen than she keeps. Laurel has always made Ellen feel like being autistic is no big deal. Ellen only gets crushes on girls, never boys, and she knows she can always rely on her best-and-only friend, Laurel, to help navigate social situations at their private Georgia middle school. She attends temple with Abba and Mom every Friday and Saturday. ![]() Thirteen-year-old Ellen Katz feels most comfortable when her life is well planned out and people fit neatly into her predefined categories. ![]() ![]() ![]() This is where Murakami is at his short and neat writing style, with witty, dynamic and often westernised dialogue, propelled by a sense of suspense and adventure. Add in some inklings – threatening, stinking fishy kind of creatures – lurking in the dark and to be avoided at all costs, and we are well and truly in Murakami territory. ![]() Our narrator is a Calcutec – a human data processor – and his latest project sees him navigating a secret underground cavernous world at the centre of Tokyo, leading to the secret lab of an eccentric old man, aided by his granddaughter. Enter Murakami’s propensity for the slightly off-kilter reality. However, as is also often the case, our narrator is about to get himself embroiled in the most unusual of situations. He lives alone, he likes his beer, he whips up delectable snacks at the drop of a hat, he loves his jazz and his western culture. One part: a Tokyo muchly similar to contemporary Tokyo but with a cyber twist, where our narrator lives a life typical to all Murakami’s male narrators in their 30s or so. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story of two parts and two worlds, a story that encapsulates two very different sides of Haruki Murakami’s writing. ![]() ![]() ![]() Princess Margaret may have enjoyed the company of artists and writers, but most of the artists and writers were at least as desperate to be seen at the same parties as the Queen’s sister, as she ever was to be entertained by them. But it also reveals the limits of the 1960s’ social revolution. Ma’am Darling shows how the bohemian and royal worlds clashed in the person of Princess Margaret. She left, but most people weren’t so brave. ![]() George Harrison once plucked up the courage to ask her if she wouldn’t mind leaving an after-show party, as protocol decreed that no one was allowed to eat before she left and the Beatles were starving. However, despite her bohemian streak, she was punctilious in matters of royal protocol. Her husband, Lord Snowdon, was a photographer, and she knew and partied with everyone who was anyone, not just in high society, but in artistic circles, too. She had no constitutional role to fulfil, but was obliged-or certainly felt obliged-to keep up royal appearances. The princess was always in a difficult position. ![]() Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret tells the story of princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, through her appearance in the diaries and memoirs of well known people over the course of her life-1930-2002. Foreign Policy & International Relations. ![]() |