Author Archives: smellincoffee

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About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

Brittannorum

Posted on May 8, 2023 by smellincoffee

A ferventi aestuosa Libya Volat Aquila LegionumSupra Terra BrittannorumVolat Aquila LegionumRoma, Roma, O RomaLegio! Aeterna! Aeterna! Victrix! Winter is coming, both for Britain and for the Druids. Rome, drawn to Britain because of its tribes’ support of their Gallic brothers … Continue reading →

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Missing that divine spark; plus, having Bing analyze me

Posted on May 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

Recently an article at Crisis magazine included an excerpt from the author’s attempt to get an AI to read all of his published articles and reproduce an essay in his style. He was pleased, and I was surprised, but not … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Of Cicero and base-ball

Posted on May 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

This week I’ve been finishing up a couple of audiobooks. The first is How to Grow Old, a short one by Cicero written during the early part of his retirement from Rome, before the odious Mark Anthony sent men to … Continue reading →

Posted in Classics and Literary, history, Religion and Philosophy, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ten Books Bing and Bard Randomly Chose from my TBR

Posted on May 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is “ten books I randomly grabbed from my shelf”, but I wanted to see if the chatGPT version of Bing could choose ten random items from a list, so I gave it my 70+ strong TBR list. Then … Continue reading →

Posted in General, quotations | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

April 2023 in Review

Posted on May 1, 2023 by smellincoffee

Well, welcome to May! I think Read of England was a tolerable success, though there were a lot of books I’d planned to read that I didn’t*, and since I did some book-buying to synch RoE with my other challenges … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Dead Acre

Posted on April 30, 2023 by smellincoffee

Dead Acre© 2020 Rhett C. Bruno & Jaime CastleRead by Roger Clark. 3 hours and change If you read Cold as Hell, you were introduced to Crowley, a gunman of the old west who died trying to protect a young … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Scenes from Prehistoric Britain

Posted on April 28, 2023 by smellincoffee

Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans© 2021 Francis Pryor320 pages Scenes from Prehistoric Britain is a curious mix of extreme detail and fanciful speculation, visiting twelve sites in (mostly) prehistoric Britain that … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights

Posted on April 27, 2023 by smellincoffee

The Acts of so-called Arthur King and his Noble Kannnnnigits© 1976 John Steinbeck364 pages It befell in the days of yore, as I rode by a book-stall in a great city, that mine eye was caught by a fair volume … Continue reading →

Posted in Classics and Literary, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Beauty = Integrity

Posted on April 26, 2023 by smellincoffee

When I began reading The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, I expected fantasy and adventure. I did not expect frequent and serious discussions, often thought-provoking. Here is a scene in which Lancelot, discovered napping under a tree, … Continue reading →

Posted in quotations | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Ten Films to Watch on a Bad Day

Posted on April 26, 2023 by smellincoffee

Today’s blogging prompt from Long and Short Reviews is….”Films to Watch on a Bad Day“. I have an album of “movies I’d save in a fire’, and these all live there! Groundhog Day.  I have watched this movie dozens of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 10 Comments