I’ve never read anything by Francesca Lia Block but I’ve always thought of her as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of authors. This is probably quite unfair, and I liked The Elementals pretty well. If anyone has recommendations of further Francesca Lia Block books I should read, please take to the comments and let me know. My libraries have a number of Francesca Lia Block books for me to read on my Nook, and I have jury duty later this month so I will need plenty of reading material. Ariel Silverman’s best friend Jeni (awesome name, absurd spelling) vanished, and…
21 CommentsReading the End Posts
So for Amy’s Meaningful Gift Exchange series (Amy, in case I haven’t said it recently, you are a delight in every way, and when I have thought about quitting blogging in the past, you are one of the bloggers I always think how much I would miss), we are writing posts about meaningful gifts. And I thought I’d say a few words about being a good gift-giver. I am a really good gift-giver. I give thoughtful, meaningful, excellent gifts. I know you aren’t supposed to brag about yourself, and usually I don’t and I try to recognize my own limitations…
25 CommentsThe lovely Rachel of Book Snob sent me Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters, a book that is reminiscent of, but not nearly as good as, I Capture the Castle. The five Harvey sisters have grown up rather isolated, with their invalid mother and their father, a famous mystery writer. The eldest, Pandora, was recently married, and now the next two girls, Morgan (our narrator) and Thisbe, are sort of on the lookout for men to marry, even though they have basically never met a man before. Two men show up in pretty short order, and everyone goes into a tizzy.…
23 CommentsHere is a book I checked out on the recommendation of a few-years-old Best Books of the Year list, the others on the list having appealed to me very little (or else I already read them). It is about a bunch of scientists working at a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discover cures for cancer by trying different things on rats. One researcher, Cliff, begins to have dramatic results with his experiments, and the lab explodes with excitement and papers and research grants. Gradually his colleague and ex-girlfriend, Robin, begins to believe that his results are fraudulent; and her accusation…
9 CommentsTwo-thirds of the way through this book I wanted to buy it for everyone on my Christmas list. At the end of it, I no longer did. I felt sort of depressed and unfinished. That right there is my untrammeled reaction. I am writing this post (responsibly far in advance!) on the evening of the second day of the hurricane. Very very unusually I am writing it only a few hours after finishing the book, so please forgive me if my thoughts on it seem a trifle unorganized. Ana has sung the praises of Elizabeth Hand extensively, and although I…
35 CommentsSo there are two books I’ve been trying to get at the library for a very long time without acknowledging to the world how much I wanted them because I feel guilty checking out kids’ books from my library because I always think of all the actual kids in the world who are being deprived of their books by my greed: Bunheads (this one here) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, for which I am still waiting and which may never, ever, ever get in at the library ever. I read a glowing review of the latter on NPR, and the…
24 CommentsSo! Kate Morton! In the past I’ve had some feelings about the way Kate Morton does her plots and sentences. This has bothered me in different degrees for different books — The House at Riverton was close to pure joy (I was reading it on vacation) but did not stand up to rereads, and The Forgotten Garden bugged me with some heavy-handed plot devices. But The Secret Keeper is her fourth book, and some of the tics I didn’t love in the first two I’ve read are gone now, and overall it was a fun, engaging, non-annoying read. As a…
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