Yes, I bought it. I bought it, and it was amazing. Y’all talked me into it. I was stacking the deck, really, by asking for advice from a bunch of people who I know can’t stick to their own book-buying bans, let alone propose that others do so. It’s like when I call up Social Sister to ask her if I should buy a pair of cute shoes. To recapitulate, Nox is a version of the journal Anne Carson made after her brother died. They had been estranged for years, and she heard of his death several weeks after it…
26 CommentsReading the End Posts
And magical realism rears its ugly — no, I’m kidding. The Oracle of Stamboul has the tiniest ever amount of magical realism, actually the perfect amount. At the start of the story, when our protagonist Eleonora is about to be born, the author mentions a flock of hoopoes (they look like this, if you’re curious) that comes to settle near her house on the night of her birth. After that, I was on red alert, as my displeasure with an excess of magical realism is rapid and permanent. But first-time author Michael David Lukas has a light touch with the…
27 CommentsI could swear I wrote this review already. I wonder if I dreamed it. I frequently have vivid, detailed dreams where I do things that need to get done, which I think is my subconscious’s way of trying to keep me asleep. One day last month I dreamed I checked my email and we had a snow day and I could sleep in (but we didn’t really) (fortunately, I didn’t fall for this). Today when I woke up all sickly and went back to sleep feeling like I was going to die, I dreamed that I had texted and facebook-messaged…
19 CommentsWhen I was telling my friend tim about the plot of this book, the title of which I did not mention, she said, “Oh hey! It sounds like The Makropoulis Case,” which evidently is an opera by a Czech composer I’ve never heard of because I am very, very ignorant of all things opera-related. I went and read the Wikipedia article on the opera in question, and the moral of the story is that if you are going to read a book that is an homage to an opera, you should (a) know going in that it is an homage…
34 CommentsI don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but one of my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions — which I’m beginning to sense were overwhelmingly food-based — was to modify several existing recipes to create one amalgam recipe, and then use that amalgam recipe to cook an official food of Louisiana and have it come out awesome. Very specific resolution, you say? All the happier she who accomplishes it! If you are not yet sold on retroactive New Year’s Resolutions (but it seems like everyone was, and I appreciate your support), I strongly encourage you to give them a try.…
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