Richard’s Ramblings

Billed as one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would serve the reader better as two separate novels. The two primary characters — Anna, the beautiful and courtly infidel, and Levin, the introspective recluse — and their supporting cast have such infrequent interaction that I spent the last two-thirds [...]

Book number six of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, titled Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince begins:
He looked rather like an old lion. There were streaks of grey in his mane of tawny hair and his bushy eyebrows; he had keen yellowish eyes behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and a certain rangy, loping [...]

I recently started reading the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
It wasn’t until I was just about finished with the first chapter that I realized that I was one of probably only a dozen people in the world that hadn’t read the first Harry Potter book. (I’m also one of only a likely handful that [...]