Tra-la, tra-la, I am jonesing so hard for Dorothy Sayers right now I don’t even know what to say about it. My clever-but-not-always-right friend tim stopped me from buying several other Dorothy Sayers mysteries or else it would be a Dorothy Sayers Festival all up in here. I want to read all her books. And then I want to travel to an alternate universe where she wrote more books than Agatha Christie, and read all those additional books. Many of them would feature Harriet Vane. Sigh. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, an old guy dies in the club…
39 CommentsReading the End Posts
I wish there were a whole section of the bookstore called “Journalists go do something really interesting and then write a whole book about it,” and it would include The Unlikely Disciple and Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, and this book I want to read called Turkmeniscam, and it would also include The Husbands and Wives Club, which is the book that came out of Laurie Abraham’s sitting in on a couples therapy group. I got this for Indie Sister for her birthday, but didn’t have time to read it before mailing it off to her. Next time I should give…
22 CommentsArgh, catching up after vacation is hard. I keep forgetting to write reviews of the books I read on vacation. They were not that numerous, all things considered. So here is what I want from you. 1. Advice. I likedish Three Men in a Boat but then I remembered that Jerome K. Jerome and I are implacable sworn enemies. Because of this one time that Jerome K. Jerome said that this magazine The Chameleon should be pursued by the cops, and Oscar Wilde had contributed some perfectly reasonable things to The Chameleon, and then the Marquess of Queensberry was all,…
54 CommentsMy darlings, I am off on a vacation this week. I shall see two of my oldest and most awesome friends, go shopping for spring clothes at thrift stores, inspect an apparently very wonderful used bookstore, and watch Angel with my clever friend tim. I will miss you, and I continue to love you, but I won’t be around this next week so I will probably miss some awesome posts by you. Please stop by and tell me what I’m missing, so I can catch up on things when I return. Meanwhile, I am trying to learn about magic and…
23 CommentsFiveBooks! What? How could you let me down like this? The Riddle of the Sands was supposed to be one of the five best books in all the land on the Secret Service. Uncool! I just thought it was going to be so excited, nonstop intrigue and deception, culminating in some sort of thrilling climax where all the previously-introduced thrilling spy elements would come together in for an astounding finish. Like the sort of thing H. Rider Haggard would do, if H. Rider Haggard wrote spy novels. Why was it not like that? The premise promised good things: Our protagonist,…
48 CommentsWhy I read the end: The protagonist bought I Capture the Castle thinking it was a historical fiction book about an actual siege. I half wanted to make sure Mori found out the truth about the book, and half wanted Jo Walton to leave it alone as a sly nod to those of her readers who know about I Capture the Castle, and can see its influence on Among Others. Among Others is all about a Welsh girl called Mori who has come to live with her father and his sisters after the death of her twin sister, Mor, and…
40 CommentsC. P. Cavafy: I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM. I have such a crush on Cavafy right now. I want to collect every translation of his poems that has ever been done, and compare them. I want to learn modern Greek, an impulse I have never had before, just so I can read Cavafy in the original. Wikipedia says translations don’t capture Cavafy. In fact it says “the poems also exhibit a skilled and versatile craftsmanship, which is almost completely lost in translation.” Dammit. But even so, check it: As one long since prepared, as one courageous, as befits you…
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Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin
I hate reviewing sequels. Once I have reviewed the original volume in a series, I have a hard time motivating myself to review the subsequent ones, even if I really, really liked them. Patrick Ness was an exception to this, probably because his books were so insanely good and rich and full of themes to see and tell, and because I so desperately wanted you all to trot out and read them tomorrow. Which some of you did, so goody, mission accomplished. I will not gush quite that much about the first two books in N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, but…
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