Don’t you love titles with semicolons? This one’s full name is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In a lot of ways, it’s like And the Band Played On – a medical mystery! The book follows a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 (the year Oscar Wilde was born!), how it began and how it spread, and how a scientist and a vicar tracked it down and discovered how it was transmitted. What had happened was that a baby girl got cholera, and her mother dumped…
8 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
This is a longstanding complaint really, but I’ve been reminded of it today by Paperback Reader‘s lovely shelf of beige books. See those Salman Rushdie books? This is the source of my displeasure. Because I like Salman Rushdie quite a lot. In fact I am thinking it is probably time to read Shalimar the Clown, one of two of Rushdie’s books that I’ve been saving. I like Salman Rushdie a lot, and I like these editions of his books (link is to The Moor’s Last Sigh, the other of Rushdie’s books I’m saving for myself). But they don’t have my…
21 CommentsFor Jeane’s Dog Ear Challenge: West with the Night was the nonfiction book on an obscure topic/on a topic you don’t often read about. I had a broad selection of Jeane recommendations for this one, since she is always reading books that sound interesting but that I would never pick up on my own. West with the Night is Beryl Markham’s memoir of growing up on her father’s farm in Africa, and becoming a horse trainer, and eventually learning to fly a plane. Beryl Markham sounds like a pretty cool person, though from reading her Wikipedia article it sounds like…
14 CommentsImagine my surprise when I discovered this at the bookshop! The American bookshop because the book is here in America now! Who knew? It’s thrilling! Odd and the Frost Giants is about a boy called Odd who has bad luck. His father has drowned, and his stepfather doesn’t much care for him, and an accident with a tree has left him with serious and lasting injuries to one of his legs. He runs away from home, into the forest, where he meets a bear, a fox, and an eagle, who actually are Thor, Loki, and Odin, cast out of Asgard…
12 CommentsMany thanks to Schatzi for the recommendation; I enjoyed it so much. Ballerina is about these two girls, Christine and Stephanie, who are dancers in the same ballet school; upon graduation, they wind up in separate ballet companies but remain quite close. Stephanie has a crazy stage mother who ditched ballet For a Man, and Christine, who is rich, has some sort of medical Condition, severe social anxiety, and parents who never come to see her dance. There are lots of bitchy gay dancers and a slutty Russian guy that Christine and Stephanie get into a big fight over. Heeheehee,…
9 CommentsA.D. is a graphic novel about seven people from New Orleans. The author interviewed these people extensively, visited New Orleans, took pictures, and then created this book. It tells the stories of people who left and people who stayed, wealthyish people and poorish people, black people and white people. I liked reading this book, because it aligns very nicely with my memories of the hurricane. The high school kids talked about how they were going to miss a couple of days of school, and everyone expected it to turn east the way they always do, and the doctor has a…
6 CommentsI realized yesterday that I hadn’t read any of my other books for the RIP IV Challenge, and they all came due today, and I had to renew them by an unnecessarily complicated process because the library is also being fail lately. Anyway so I grabbed Let The Right One In (why is it called Let Me In on my copy?) to read it and I came to a realization. I am just tired of vampires. I have had enough. There are vampires everywhere and it is too many vampires, and I need a break from them. But there is…
30 Comments