I should know better. I very foolishly checked Slaughterhouse Five out of the library and brought it to read on our camping trip even though I suspected I wasn’t going to like it and I knew the person who recommended it to me was going to be on our camping trip wanting me to like it. I read books when I’m given them, and when I don’t like them, I’m likely to say “I liked [specific thing],” or “It’s very well-written!”, rather than lying straight out with something like “Yes! I liked it!”, and I had planned exactly what I…
47 CommentsCategory: 1 Star
The Wordy Shipmates is about the Puritans, John Winthrop and his lot, who came to America, and all the stuff they did. Vowell admires their courage and intelligence without giving them a pass on all the things we don’t like about Puritans – the intransigence, the praying for American Indians to die of plague, etc. It’s more of an essay collection than a history book, with Vowell speaking to her own life and how she has found strength in the writings of the Puritans, plus some fairly predictable party-line remarks on American politics. Plus all the stuff about the Puritans.…
27 CommentsI simply cannot get on with Patricia McKillip. I don’t know what it is about her books that displease me. The writing is lovely, her characters are likeable, the plots are interesting – and still, every single time I pick up one of her books, I end up stewing in displeasure and finally asking myself, Jenny, why are you torturing yourself like this? Just put the damn book down and read something else. Winter Rose is a retelling of Tam Lin. I love that story! As previously mentioned, I am reading a bunch of retellings of that story. And there…
10 CommentsI do not appreciate casual slaps at the South for being racist. I do not mind delineations of particular racist things the South has done and continues to do (that’s fair, although I don’t know why the North always gets such a pass), but I just can’t stand this unsupported assumption that the South is full of people ten times more racist than the rest of the country. So I didn’t like it in this book when the Mysterious (read: deeply aggravating and nobody in her right mind would ever bother with him) Boy Next Door, Dominic, says a few…
11 CommentsI picked this up at the library a little while ago, and realized when I got it home that I had read about it here before checking it out and completely forgotten. Weird. You wouldn’t think I’d be able to manage being uninterested in a memoir about someone whose father was a faith healer. But I just never got interested in this. For someone with such a colorful life, this guy has written a book that was surprisingly bland (yeah, I mixed that metaphor. Got a problem?). Even before I began to suspect that Mr. Smith genuinely believes in his…
Leave a CommentThe whole comics noir genre may just not be for me. Why, why, why is it necessary to write o’ for of? Why is it necessary to write sittin’ for sitting? IT IS NOT, MY FRIENDS.
5 CommentsI started out liking this book a lot, and then I liked it progressively less and less. Fie to Philip Pullman who thinks it is so wonderful – this is just the sort of book you would think he would like. Bah. I agree with GeraniumCat that it’s a really interesting and genuine depiction of the dead, but I didn’t like the book taken altogether. I got tired and depressed reading it, which I don’t think is the effect books are meant to have. Plus, although Tarot cards didn’t feature prominently, I often didn’t like the interpretations of the cards…
1 CommentBlech. Everyone’s been reading Susan Hill lately, and her books all sounded so creepy and cool, but I couldn’t finish this. I stayed up late last night reading it, because I kept thinking I would read it until it got interesting and then I would go to sleep and have something to look forward to in the morning. What a stupid idea. I mean, that was always going to be a stupid idea, but it was particularly stupid in this case because the book never got interesting at all. Two-thirds of the way through, I figured out that I was…
1 CommentI got this out of the library on a whim, as I was passing, because I liked the cover and I haven’t read any new graphic novels recently. Shortcomings is about a guy called Ben Tanaka and the breakdown of (primarily) his relationship with his community activist girlfriend Miko. I found it hard to like for two reasons: 1. I do not like alienated protagonists. I just don’t. I wanted to take Holden Caulfield and feed him to hungry lions. So I didn’t like Ben, and I didn’t want to read about him, because he was completely unpleasant. 2. And…
7 Comments