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Reading the End Posts

Review: All Clear, Connie Willis

Both these things are true: I liked and felt satisfied with All Clear, the second of two books about time-traveling Oxford historians who get stuck in Britain in World War II; and, it is perfectly possible I will never read another book by Connis Willis. Blackout left us on a cliffhanger. Eileen, Polly, and Mike, three Oxford historians from the future, are trapped in London in World War II. Their drops did not open to return them to Oxford, and their Oxford retrieval teams never showed up. They have begun to fear that they have accidentally changed history, that England…

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The Good Wife

This has gone on long enough, this business where I haven’t written an entire post about The Good Wife and how marvelous it is. Readers, I need a moment of your time. (Good Wife reference! Get it? Anyone? Get it? Legal Sister?) If you are like Past Jenny, you have heard of The Good Wife and its acclaimedness, but you haven’t watched it because you do not like Chris Noth and although you like Alan Cumming just fine and have nothing against Julianna Margulies, that is not enough to induce you to watch a show that looks like it will…

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Turned out not to be a review: The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett

Disclaimer: I started this review with goodish intentions, and it went all pear-shaped as I went on with it. I am so sorry. I nearly didn’t post it, but then I thought, Well, what if someone who reads this blog loves W.H. Auden and lives in Washington DC, and without this blog post they wouldn’t know to go see The Habit of Art when it’s on at the Studio Theatre in the fall of the year? So I’m posting it anyway. I am so, so sorry. One point I’ve beaten to death on this blog is that comparisons are odious.…

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Review: You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

Further study may confirm or deny this, but I suspect that short story collections do not make for good book club discussions. Or maybe my nonwork brunch book club is just bad at keeping on topic. We completely forgot to brainstorm a name for ourselves, and we spent about twenty (nonconsecutive) minutes talking about the book, and the remainder of the time chattering about shoes. You Know When the Men Are Gone is a loosely connected group of short stories about the army: life on an army base, or life in a war zone, or how to handle a homecoming.…

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Review: Which Brings Me to You, Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott

I am a sucker for an epistolary novel. I will read anything epistolary, even something so patently ridiculous as Clarissa. (Yes, I’ve read Clarissa. Yes, it was really silly. I have recently learned there was a BBC adaptation of it with Sean Bean and since I have for Sean Bean feelings that teeter on the boundary between man-crush and proper real crush, I will be checking that out from the library ASAP.) When Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkeysee blog mentioned Which Brings Me to You on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (the only podcast I listen to because it…

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Translations, Brian Friel

I have now read two of Brian Friel’s plays (this one on the recommendation of my theater-savvy coworker) and I have determined that I am strongly in favor of him. Ordinarily I do not seek out the Lit’rature of Ireland, ancestral home though it is.1 Because the Lit’rature of Ireland seems terribly depressing, and even when it is Breakfast on Pluto and produced both that darling little film with Cillian Murphy and the excellent line about “his disagreeing face, disagreeing because it is as if he is saying ‘you can say this is happening but I don’t agree with you’”…

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Review: The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker

I meant to sneak this post in under the wire for National Poetry Month, but April came to a rapid and surprising end before I was able to. Never mind. The Anthologist is a book for all seasons. The Anthologist follows the slightly scattered thoughts of poet Paul Chowder about poetry and life as he struggles to produce an introduction to an anthology of poetry he’s editing. Historically I have not been a fan of books with thin plots, or books about alienated writers who have scared off their significant others by being impossible and now need to mope about…

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