Sheesh, what is wrong with me? This is the second book in the past week I haven’t been able to finish. And honestly, not finishing books is pretty rare with me. I swear! If I make it past the first few pages, I tend to plow through to the end, because I want to know what happens, and because I am a completist. To give you a comparison, I read like four of Anne Rice’s vampire books, which I never liked in the first place, before realizing I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read any more of them. I…
5 CommentsTag: historical fiction
This is another one of those I’ve read about on several different websites. Trish’s book blog, Caribousmom, SassyMonkey … probably more, but those are the ones I remember. Everyone kept saying how good it was, but the library hadn’t got it in, and I didn’t like Language of Light enough to finish it, so I put off reading it. The Wednesday Sisters is all about five women in the sixties (then seventies) who become very close friends and form a writing group. Which isn’t doing it justice, because there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist. There are…
1 CommentRecommended by my mother. Of course. This is a book about a girl in 1920s New Orleans who dies prematurely, before anything about her life gets properly decided, particularly before she makes a decision about her boyfriend Andrew, a fact that proves troublesome to her after she dies. She is called Razi, and she haunts a Baton Rouge couple, Amy and Scott, who are dealing with the fallout from a loss of their own. The story flips back and forth between their story and Razi’s life as a – for lack of a better word – ghost, over the years,…
2 CommentsThere has never been a more picked-up-at-random than this book. Basically I was at Bongs & Noodles before the storm, trying to pick out a good hurricane book. And I kind of wanted to get Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I had already read it. And I kind of wanted to get The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro, because of how haunting I remember Never Let Me Go was, but I felt doubtful about it. So I sat on a chair gazing at my options, and then I realized that what I really wanted was to read The Far Pavilions…
3 CommentsThe Temeraire series continues, hooray! I liked this one much more than I did the last two. It was more pulled together than they’ve been, and Laurence was very, very polite, and Temeraire is still a cutie. I’ve been having ongoing concerns that Laurence will get less polite the more he hangs out with the Aerial Corps people (and Jane, who bores me). He didn’t though. He might have been the most polite in this book that he’s been in any of the books. Ah, courtesy. They flew to Africa, and I felt, of all the places they’ve been, Ms.…
1 CommentRecommended by some book blog somewhere, though damned if I remember where. I’ve been meaning to get this out of the library for ages, and it was very fortunately not checked out last time I went. Oh, it was such fun to read! I was so pleased by it! It’s all about the Brits during the Napoleonic Wars, only they’ve put in dragons also. Laurence, the main guy, is a captain in the Royal Navy and he’s all got his duty and good manners and his ship captures a dragon’s egg from a French ship, and the egg hatches and…
1 CommentRecommended by: A Life in Books, sort of, in that she said she loved anything by Sarah Waters and I randomly grabbed Night Watch when I went to the library. I don’t know if it’s just because I love Britain in World War II or what, but I really, really loved Night Watch. It was swell. I so much didn’t want it to end that I put it down and left it alone for ages before returning to it today and finishing it all up in one gobble. Basically it’s about four (Kay, Viv, Helen, Duncan – yes, four) people…
3 Comments