A book I can return to time and time again. This time I'm listening to the audio. I love Jim Dale's interpretation.

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Most of my books of course come from sellers in Europe (chiefly Germany and the UK), but a fair few this year did also end up traveling here from North America, when all told the American offer was better than those by European sellers.

Bought in 2019 and already read:

From Seattle, WA:

James Hilton: Was It Murder?

Candace Robb: The Apothecary Rose (Derek Perkins audio CD)

From Houston, TX:

Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling (eds.): A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales

Sandra Uwiringiyimana: How Dare the Sun Rise

From Mishawaka, IN:

Daniel Stashower: Teller of Tales

Frederic Raphael & Kenneth McLeish: The Book of Lists

Matin Durrani & Liz Kalaugher: Furry Logic

From McKeesport, PA:

Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown

From Coral Springs, FL:

J.V. Turner: Below the Clock

From St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada:

Jennifer Estep: Kill the Queen

Clayton Rawson: Death from a Top Hat

Bought in 2019 and still on my TBR (don't even comment, please):

From Seattle, WA:

James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (LoA)

Agatha Christie: Rule of Three

From Tucson, AZ:

Stephen King: 11/22/63

From Richmond, TX:

Charles Dickens: Bleak House (Paul Scofield audio CD)

From Houston, TX:

Dorothy Dunnett: The Game of Kings

From Mishawaka, IN:

Penny Le Couteur & Jay Burreson: Napoleon's Buttons

Mercedes Lackey: Arrows of the Queen

Lois McMasterBujold: The Curse of Chalion

Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias and Their Enemies, 1431-1519

Ted Widmer (ed.): American Speeches: Political Oratory from Patrick Henry to Barack Obama (LoA)

Robert Barr: The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont

C. Daly King: The Curious Mr. Tarrant

Eden Philpotts: The Red Redmaynes

Matthew Pritchard (ed.), Agatha Christie: The Grand Tour: Letters and Photographs from the British Empire Expedition 1922

From Windsor, CT:
Elie Wiesel: Night  / Dawn / The Accident (aka Day)

From Frederick, MD:

Samuel Johnson; E.L. McAdam, Jr. & George Milne (eds.): A Johnson Reader

From Kennesaw, GA:

Christopher Isherwood. A Single Man (Simon Prebble audio CD)

Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm (Stanley Tucci audio CD)

From St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada:

Otto Penzler (ed.): Bibliomysteries

(Task: The historic (3d century AD) St. Lucia was Italian; yet, like those of many other saints (including, e.g., St. Andrew and St. Nicholas), the most important celebrations of her holiday don’t occur in her place of origin but somewhere else in the world.

List or create a stack of favorite books (minimum: three) featuring a character’s move or transition from one part of the world to another one (or from one end of a large country, e.g., U.S. Canada, Russia, China or Australia, to the other end.)

Alternatively, tell us: Which book that you acquired this year had to travel the farthest to get to you (regardless whether by plane, sea, or whichever other way, and regardless whether it was a purchase of your own or a gift from someone else)?)

Stranger Things Square: Bellairs' Johnny Dixon series was set in the 1950s, but this was published in 1984 and features two smart-alec kids teaming up with a priest to defeat evil.

The professor invites Johnny on a winter holiday to see the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but an accident on the icy roads strands them in a small town. Coincidentally the inn in that town has one of the professor's family heirlooms in a back storage room. Of course it does. The heirloom is a tall mantel clock with a dollhouse room built into the base. It depicts a room of the Childermass  estate, the study and a doll of the professor's great-uncle on the evening of his mysterious death. Of course it does.

Inside the diorama sits exquisite miniature human skull that Johnny is fascinated by and, for reasons, ends up in his pocket. Afterwards Johnny has a compulsion to tell no one about the skull and eventually carries it around with him (did he learn NOTHING from the blue figurine?) even after he has odd dreams and the professor himself disappears after Johnny sees a phantom jack-o-lantern in the professor's window.

'Sorcerer's Skull' is noteworthy in the Bellairs canon not just for Johnny's vacation with his elderly friend Roderick Childermass, but because he also goes on a "pleasure outing" with the parish priest, along with Fergie. This is considered a good cover, as the real reason they were off together was to battle supernatural forces, but that would have provoked suspicion.

It's a sad fact of today's world that parents would have every right to be suspicious of elderly gentlemen spiriting their children away on trips all the time. The fact that one is a priest...whoo boy....

Anyway, the nice thing about reading these Dixon mysteries more or less in order is that I can see how Bellairs did build in some initial skepticism on the part of the professor and the boys towards the supernatural. In a few books they'll be all "Welp, time to go back in time in the trolley buried in my basement" and no one will think twice. It's nice to know everyone in Duston Heights started off in the real world.

Overall this was not a strong addition to the series. Way too many coincidences going on here. I mean, couldn't the professor have just found the clock in the attic instead of in a stranger's house in a town he'd never been to? The clock had actually been stolen? I mean, evil tramp warlocks can curse people from beyond the grave, but let's be plausible about it.

Johnny Dixon

Next: 'The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost'

Previous: 'The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt'