Which can be read here, as it is out of copyright, and also this website is brilliant and I am all in favor of celebrating women writers. Recommended by: Box of Books (whom I owe an apology) I am sorry for griping abut The Semi-Attached Couple and its unbitchy nature. Emily Eden is very amusing, and in many ways she is quite like Jane Austen but bitchier. So I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions even though Helen in The Semi-Attached Couple was very annoying. Now I have just finished The Semi-Detached House, and it was completely charming. Everyone in it…
Leave a CommentAuthor: Gin Jenny
I’m in the middle of The Semi-Detached House, and I’m definitely much more charmed by it than I was by The Semi-Attached Couple. I like Blanche so far much more than I did Helen, and I am now definitely feeling the Jane-Austen-esque but bitchier thing. Behold: “Are you going to this concert, Baroness?” “No; it seems odd, but we are not asked this time,” said the Baroness, with an air of modest pride. “I suspect we are out of favour at Court, but a Drawing-Room is my aversion, and I have been sadly remiss this year; absolutely neglected the Birthday,…
Leave a CommentWhen David slept he dreamed more often of the creature he had named the Crooked Man, who walked through forests very like the one beyond David’s window. The Crooked Man would advance to the edge of the tree line, staring out at an expanse of green lawn to where a house just like Rose’s stood. He would speak to David in his dreams. I picked this up almost completely at random. My dad said “What else can we get Mom for Christmas?” and I said “Oh, I know. This.”, and grabbed The Book of Lost Things, which I had been…
2 CommentsCecilia went to the kitchen to fill the vase, and carried it up to her bedroom to retrieve the flowers from the handbasin. When she dropped them in they once again refused to fall into the artful disorder she preferred, and instead swung round in the water into a willful neatness, with the taller stalks evenly distributed around the rim. She lifted the flowers and let them drop again, and they fell into another orderly pattern. Still, it hardly mattered. It was difficult to imagine this Mr. Marshall complaining that the flowers by his bedside were too symmetrically displayed. She…
8 CommentsOkay, the truth comes out. You won’t believe it, but Anna Leonowens did not, in fact, have a hot but platonic romance with the King of Siam; or if she did, she kept remarkably quiet about it in her book. Although I’m not ruling out the possibility that all the late-night “translating” she was doing for the king was actually sexual favors. Because, you know, she acts like a proper Victorian lady but who knows? Seriously, though, I feel that this memoir (travelogue) lacked a certain something. Taking into account the prejudices of her time, she was still kind of…
2 CommentsOkay, I didn’t pick this up wholly at random, but it was the only Ian McEwan book at the library although I actually wanted Atonement to see how different it was to the movie, so that’s why I decided to read this one. Anyway I didn’t finish. I have a massive big stack of library books to read, and this one wasn’t impressing me at all, and I was way way in and still waiting for something to happen, and I hate those books where a dude wakes up in the morning and starts to think all about his entire…
Leave a CommentTwo months before I’d had a high-profile job with an enviable salary, a sleek black German sedan on lease, an apartment in a fashionable downtown neighborhood, and a collection of not-so-inexpensive shirts and jackets hanging in the closet. Now, there were a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no job or prospect thereof, some clothes jammed into an old handbag, and a bed in a tattered bookstore to call home. All things considered, I couldn’t have been happier. Recommended by: Kate’s Book Blog I really liked the idea of this book. It’s a memoir written by a chap who went…
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