This is the hugest book ever. I have been reading it and reading it. It’s about Edward Murrow as you might have imagined, and I will just tell you now that Edward Murrow was quite a person. He wasn’t always perfect (of course), but I admire him tremendously. Everyone I know is now tired of hearing Edward R. Murrow stories. Like the one about when he went to Buchenwald with the troops, and people there – people who were in Buchenwald – recognized him and asked if he remembered them. And the one about how someone asked his four-year-old son…
2 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
I read about this on Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s “Writer’s Table” – authors pick out books that are supposed to have “shaped their writing”, and they write little reviews in a few words. I can’t remember why I was looking at Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s Writer’s Table – although Nick Hornby is absolutely inextricably linked in my mind to the month I spent in London in 2005. There was a heat stroke in the second week of July, and the dorm where we were staying didn’t have air conditioning of course, and my room was on the third (American fourth) floor, so…
4 CommentsI’ve been meaning to read this since the trailers for the film first came out; but of course at that point, everybody else had the exact same idea, and all the copies were checked out of the library. And I felt a little sheepish checking it out in the first place because I am older than its target audience, but not by a comfortable enough margin – like when I was in elementary school and I still watched Sesame Street but I couldn’t admit it for another few years yet – so I didn’t want to put the book on…
8 CommentsMy university’s book fair came round again. Last year I bought a number of books, and felt very happy about it, but last year was not the same, for two main reasons. One, I didn’t have as much money to spend at the book bazaar last year; and two, I didn’t have an empty bookshelf to fill last year. This year I had a bunch of money budgeted for it, and I was also recently given an empty bookshelf. It’s sitting at work waiting to be taken home. All empty. I went three times on Thursday, because I had the…
5 CommentsI must be getting old. I could swear I read about this on somebody’s book blog – again! Just like A Map of Home! But apparently I didn’t because I just pulled up all of them on my blogroll and did searches and couldn’t find this damn book. So I am forced to conclude that I did what I sometimes do, which is search the library catalogue for a book that I did read about – in this case, Nancy Werlin’s Impossible, which Superfastreader said was good – and when I find they don’t have it in, I get another…
1 CommentI just spent five minutes combing through my “Reference” page trying to figure out where I heard about this book. I have no idea, but apparently it wasn’t from someone’s website. I guess I must have just grabbed it off the new books shelf at the library. A Map of Home is all about a girl called Nidali whose father is Palestinian and her mother is Greek-Egyptian, and they live in Kuwait first, and then Egypt, and then eventually America. While she is growing up. It’s a coming-of-age thing. Really, this book was excellent. The concept wasn’t the most original…
3 CommentsI put a hold on this book in November, after reading about it here, and I almost canceled it the day before it actually came in, because I thought surely the book was lost and would never be returned, and I was just out of luck as far as reading this book went. Which I thought was too bad because it sounded interesting, and I was curious to know what I missed out on when I dropped out of the library science master’s program. This book is amusing and entertaining, which is what it’s intended to be. The stories he…
Leave a CommentJust finished reading three books I’d been looking forward to, and none of them wholly pleased me. What I Was, Meg Rosoff – All about a boy called Hilary (bless) who goes to a British boarding school and becomes a bit obsessed with another young boy called Finn, who lives by himself in a little hut that can only be reached during low tide. I thought the revelation about Finn at the end was a bit of a let-down, since the rest of the book didn’t at all seem a revelation-type book. Besides which I do not appreciate stories in…
4 Comments