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Reading the End Posts

After You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell

After You’d Gone begins at the end: our protagonist Alice sees something nasty in the woodshed (as it were; it’s not really a woodshed) and shortly thereafter gets hit by a car (possibly on purpose) and lapses into a coma.  The rest of the book goes circling and swooping around what happened and why and what it meant to Alice, exploring her past and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, shifting points of view and tenses every few pages.  I know I complained recently about rapidly-shifting narrative focus.  It’s disorienting here too, and there’s no reason to be changing tenses every…

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Review: Wise Children, Angela Carter

Claire of Paperback Reader has selected April as the month to make everybody read Angela Carter, her favorite ever author.  Her enthusiasm is contagious!  And so even though I got tired of Angela Carter’s fairy tales when I tried to read The Bloody Chamber (I can’t be doing with too many short stories at once), and even though I gave up on Nights at the Circus a while ago (it fell due and I was reading other books), I decided to try again.  I am the master of trying again. By the way, I do not like it that “master…

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Guest review: Blankets, Craig Thompson

That’s right, everyone!  My puppy voice paid off!  My mumsy has agreed to review Blankets here guestily.  I am hoping that she will find she loves doing guest reviews and will subsequently write about some of the cool and interesting books she read when she was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology.  She has many books about women in the Bible and feminism in Catholicism and like that, and I would slap a Women Unbound label on the reviews she would write of them, and then I would pretend they counted towards my totals.  Because I have been shamefully…

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National Poetry Month! It’s nearly over!

That post title sounds celebratory, but actually it is urgent, because National Poetry Month is nearly over and I have still not gotten it together to write a post about poetry.  And now that I am sitting down to do it, I’m not sure what to say, because I do not really understand my tastes in poetry and do not know how to explain them.  Sometimes I will like a poem without exactly understanding it, just because of the strange and interesting ways the words have been put together; and then one day, I will be in the middle of…

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Review: The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett

You know how sometimes you really, really want to like a book?  Because maybe people have suggested it to you with great enthusiasm, and you think they are lovely people, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings by disliking their book?  And also it is a book by a British author full of British humo(u)r, and when you were in England maybe several different people told you that Americans have bad senses of humo(u)r and don’t understand irony, and even though you know those people were absurd and Alanis Morrisette is Canadian, there is still a tiny portion of…

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Conversation

Me: I came over to visit my schnooky puppy an’ snuddle her little puppy self and kiss her puppy nose. Mumsy: Why are you like this? Me: Oh, hey, Mumsy, you should do a guest review on my blog! Mumsy: No. Me: Yes!  Mumsy, you should!  What about all those reviews you do on GoodReads and LibraryThing?  I could just– Mumsy: No!  They’re no good! Me: Oh, Mumsy.  The bar that has been set by me is oh so very very low. Mumsy: Oh I don’t want to. Me: Come on!  It’ll be fun!  I’ll be all, Heeeeeeere’s Mumsy!  And…

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Review: Weight, Jeanette Winterson

I feel like all the Kage Baker books I’m reading should qualify for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, because they do feel more like fantasy than science fiction.  However, despite their genre-bending qualities, they have cyborgs, and the time travel is done with machines.  So Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules, is my first read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, in which I am pretending I am not really taking part. Weight is a book about looking for new ways to tell stories.  That is a theme that I love.  It’s…

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Review: Sky Coyote and Mendoza in Hollywood, Kage Baker

I was going to review Kelly Corrigan’s memoir The Middle Place, but then I realized that there is no particular value in reviewing things in the order you read them, especially when you are devouring a series like a wascally wabbit devours carrots, and each review you write that is not dedicated to the series in question is going to put you further and further behind on reviews.  So here we are.  My contention that Kelly Corrigan is mistaken in her book’s central claim will have to wait. Speaking of sound effects, Kage Baker’s books are now giving me the…

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Review: Poppy Shakespeare, Clare Allan

Remember when I said I love y’all?  And one of the things I said was that y’all have offered me books just because I said I really wanted to read them?  Well, Poppy Shakespeare is one of those.  raidergirl at an adventure in reading reviewed it a while ago, and I had a moan over the fact that my library hadn’t got it and wouldn’t order it (my library has a function where you can ask it to order books but they have never, ever listened to one of my suggestions; meanwhile a good friend of mine says they order…

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Review: In the Garden of Iden, Kage Baker

Embarrassing confessions can be good for the soul, so here’s one of mine.  Sometimes when I read a book by a new author, and I really really like it, and then I go to the library and see there’s a whole shelf of books by that author – sometimes, when that happens, I get a little internal sound effect of a deep, serious voice going “So it begins.” Well, okay, always.  Every time that happens, I get the sound effect.  And it doesn’t always work out.  Sometimes the author breaks my heart.  Sometimes I accidentally read the best book first…

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