Tara read this book late last year, and she said she was shocked by the turns the book took, which, y’all, if you are ever trying to convince me to read a book? Shocked is a good adjective to use. Family saga will get you nowhere. I cannot at present think of any family sagas I have read and disliked (or any I have read and liked, actually), but I have conceived a violent prejudice against them. In this case, Tara said both shocked and family saga, and shocked won out. Sometimes that happens. And now that shocked no longer…
16 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
Watching the English, Kate Fox I have a confession to make, y’all. I am a sucker for pop psychology, and also pop sociology and yes, pop anthropology. It’s all, you know, it’s all readable, and there are interview excerpts, and people talk about what they think and why they do the things they do. How could anyone not love that? I love that so much! I know that Kate Fox’s Watching the English is observational and subjective and thus Not Proper Science, and maybe it was a tiny smidge repetitive…and yet I do not care. Because it got me all…
43 CommentsHouse of Leaves put me in the mood for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I can’t account for because they are two wildly dissimilar books. House of Leaves is terribly modern and American and all sort of up in your face, and Jonathan Strange is set in early nineteenth-century England (alternate England, but still) and is much with the fairies and book-learning and wry gentility. Anyway I fetched out my convenient three-volume box set of paperbacks, and I read it starting in 2009 and finished in 2010. There should really be a word for a book you start one…
37 CommentsHello to experimental fiction. One of my roommates in college loved this book, and kept telling me to read it, and I went on the internets and found this interview with Mark Danielewski where he said something about how older readers would probably not like his book because they’ve been taught to have certain expectations of what books look like, and he doesn’t conform to those expectations because he thinks books can be so much more. And it’s not that I disagree with him on any particular point, but his tone aggravated me, and the book looked all crazy and…
11 CommentsI usually read The Seagulls Woke Me when I have just finished Greensleeves and cannot bear to leave it absolutely behind right away; they are both books about girls who get away from (or find?) themselves. The Seagulls Woke Me is a good transition from Greensleeves to, you know, regular life. It helps me to be less disappointed in other books. I am always pleased when I find a book that makes this nice transition for me. Tam Lin for Fire and Hemlock; Rebecca for Jane Eyre; if I ever find one for The Book Thief, that will be a…
21 CommentsIn 1935, a mother wrote in to a British motherhood magazine saying this: Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbors. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house….Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing? In response, a group of women formed…
25 CommentsThere are only a very few books by Diana Wynne Jones that I don’t own, and here they are and this is why: 1. The Time of the Ghost. Written in 1981, right before Diana Wynne Jones went on her crazy winning streak made out of amazing brilliance and win, between 1981 and 1986, this is my very least by a lot favorite of Diana Wynne Jones’s books. I have read it over and over, and I have never managed to like it. 2. A Tale of Time City. Because I have only started liking it recently, and I have…
17 Comments