The Reading Room

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8:38 AM

Q: Use of "Poke" as Victorian slang in Fingersmith

Sarah Waters' award-winning Victorian crime novel Fingersmith makes liberal use of period underworld slang. Indeed the title is such slang for a petty thief. Most of it is unfamiliar to the modern reader but easy to understand from the context. My curiosity was piqued by the unfamiliar language ...

7 hours later…

Bookworm

3:38 PM

Q: Children's book(s) with animal stories

I am trying to find a children's book(s) that I read as a kid. I read it around 1991-2000 so it could only be sooner than that, no later. I am saying books because they might be 2, although I think it was just 1. All the characters in the books were animals that could talk and there were differe...

story-identification

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

5:17 PM

@Bookworm HNQ.

Christophe Strobbe

6:13 PM

webcomicname.com/post/184550557104

Napoleon Wilson

And here I thought the punchline would be that having read a ton of books doesn't automagically make you intelligent. ;-)

Christophe Strobbe

Oh no

Christophe Strobbe

6:33 PM

We haven't had any French topic challenges so far, and the two proposals for French topics that are currently available have only received two (net) upvotes at the moment. So I'm wondering if I should propose Guy de Maupassant, who wrote many short stories, many of which are available in English translation. See for example Guy de Maupassant on Wikisource.