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Reading the End Posts

Review: The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

What do you know?  Life sends such unexpected blessings (and this review contains lots of spoilers).  I reread The Hobbit for the first time since I was small, and didn’t want to stab anybody in the eyes. Except for the dwarves in the beginning; and then Gandalf throughout because, frankly, who made him the king of the world?  He just gets to decide that Bilbo would be good on an adventure and risk his whole life to get a couple of bags of gold?  When it all works out, Gandalf nods and winks and makes wry comments about how good…

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Reviews: Heaven and The First Part Last, Angela Johnson

I am having an absolute orgy of reading today.  So far today I have read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, the book of this website, Peter and Max (well, I finished Peter and Max, I didn’t start it today), The First Part Last, and The Pinhoe Egg.  IT IS AMAZING.  I started around nine-forty this morning, and I just cannot believe how quickly these books are zipping by me.  I am taking a break now because I can’t decide which of my books to read next. When I went to the library for The First Part Last, which I’ve wanted to read…

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Review: Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett

Recommended by Annie the Superfast Reader.  Don’t Sleep There are Snakes chronicles missionary/anthropologist Daniel Everett’s time with the Pirahã tribe in Brazil.  As a young linguist, Everett moved to Brazil with his family to learn the Pirahã language and translate the Bible into Pirahã, thus to spread the Good News of the Lord.  In learning the language and spending time with the tribe, he found that the Pirahã are so focused on immediacy of experience that they were completely uninterested in the Bible.  They shook his faith. Going in, I thought this was going to be a personal memoir about Everett’s faith and…

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Chrestomanci Chrestomanci Chrestomanci

I can’t get any posting done for heaven’s sake!  I have finished and not reviewed five books I was planning to review.  There are two more books sitting atop the bookshelf by my bed, nearly finished but I don’t want to actually finish them because then I’d have seven books that I was planning to review that I haven’t reviewed yet.  Peter and Max and The Book of Secrets will just have to wait.  I AM ONLY HUMAN. In a frenzy of love for Diana Wynne Jones, I fetched out Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Conrad’s Fate…

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The Moonflower Vine, Jetta Carleton

Tara read this book late last year, and she said she was shocked by the turns the book took, which, y’all, if you are ever trying to convince me to read a book?  Shocked is a good adjective to use.  Family saga will get you nowhere.  I cannot at present think of any family sagas I have read and disliked (or any I have read and liked, actually), but I have conceived a violent prejudice against them.  In this case, Tara said both shocked and family saga, and shocked won out.  Sometimes that happens. And now that shocked no longer…

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Review: Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones

I am selectively craving Diana Wynne Jones right now.  Diana Wynne Jones is so great that I’ve devoted nearly half of the spinning bookshelf my father made me to her books alone.  (The spinning bookshelf denotes great favoritism and also contains Martin Millar, J.K. Rowling, and Rumer Godden.)  (Er, just so we’re clear, it doesn’t spin perpetually, like those spinny restaurants.  It’s more like spinning earring racks at gift shops, except bigger and wooden and it has books on it rather than accessories.) Does anyone else take great notice of words whose letters are all standards, which is to say,…

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Half(ish)way through The Hobbit

Eva wants to know how we are all faring with The Hobbit, and I must say I am enjoying it a moderate amount, which is a moderate amount more than I was expecting to enjoy it.  At the start of chapter 9, these are my thoughts: 1. When I started out, my reaction was exactly the same as it was when I was eight: I was so indignant on Bilbo’s behalf!  How dare those nasty dwarves come in, and mess up his nice house, and eat all his food, and then be all snotty and dismissive of him when he…

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Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, adapted & illustrated by P. Craig Russell

Oscar Wilde told André Gide that he had put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his writing.  It’s a typical Oscar Wilde thing to say, especially since he’d all but stopped writing at that point, and if you’ve read about Oscar Wilde, you’ll know it’s best to take anything he says with a grain of salt.  Because, you know, hello to the self-dramatizing!  But I have to say, in reference to this remark: although I read about Oscar Wilde all the time, I almost never read anything he’s written.  Sometimes I’ll get in a mood and…

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Two more short reviews

Sheesh, I just can’t get it together to write proper reviews this month.  So here are two unproper ones. One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead I love the title of this book, but it wasn’t as SHOCKING as I had hoped.  I was anticipating lots of SHOCKING anecdotes about the SHOCKING American tendency towards excess in weddings.  And there was a bit of that, sure, but the book is properly called One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, and it is indeed mainly focused on the selling and marketing of weddings.  Mead talks about many aspects of the marketing…

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Review: The Group, Mary McCarthy

Verdict: Upsetting. I’d never heard of The Group before Claire of Paperback Reader posted about it on her blog earlier this year, but I was immediately intrigued by her description of it (and not just because the phrase seminal feminist text is delightfully absurd).  The Group follows a group of eight 1933 Vassar graduates, with each chapter focusing on one of the girls and a major event in her life: Dottie’s first experience of sex, Priss attempting to breast-feed her first son, Libby’s struggles with her career in literature, Polly’s involvement with a married man.  It’s very frank and upfront…

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