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Category: 2 Stars

Review: In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm

For my second entry in Ana and Iris’s Long-Awaited Reads Month, I read Janet Malcolm’s book In the Freud Archives. When I discovered Janet Malcolm back in October 2011, In the Freud Archives was the book of hers that appealed to me the most. For one reason or another, I didn’t get to read it until Christmas vacation.; and I think I might have liked it better if I’d read it sooner. I am not exactly disillusioned with Janet Malcolm, but I’m not not disillusioned with her. Her writing remains as beautifully clear and elegant as I ever thought it…

4 Comments

Review: Give Me Everything You Have, James Lasdun

Long before reading Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), I read this article Lasdun wrote about acquiring a female stalker he calls Nasreen, and this discussion in Guernica Magazine between Lasdun and another writer who was targeted by Nasreen. (I was glad the second article existed because I like to have independent confirmation when there is a case as ugly and inexplicable as this one.) Nasreen was a student in a creative writing course Lasdun taught, and they corresponded by email for some time after. Nasreen’s emails became increasingly frequent and obsessive,…

25 Comments

The Song of Achilles, Madeleine Miller

So I’m trying out a new format for reviews, in keeping with the way I actually read. Y’all will have to let me know what you think. I am not wedded to this. It’s just something I’m trying. The beginning: Patroclus (the beloved of Achilles, you’ll remember) tells the story of his early life, how he is exiled from his home and send to live in Phthia (which is in Thessaly, ugh), where he meets Achilles. They soon become inseparable friends, for reasons Miller isn’t great at making clear, and after they hit puberty they become lovers.  It’s all very…

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Elinor Lipman Redux

And now we return to the subject of my newest comfort author, Elinor Lipman! Acquiring comfort authors as an adult can be difficult because there’s such a vast universe of books to read, and I have the internet as an endless recommendation machine, whereas young Jenny often checked out the same book from the library over and over again until it became as familiar as a teddy bear. But Elinor Lipman’s books were like a teddy bear right away, so I was very excited to see two — a new novel and a collection of essays — pop up on…

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The English, Jeremy Paxman

Before we get to my thoughts on this book (short version: not as enjoyable as Watching the English), let’s take a moment for a little segment I like to call PRAISE PLEASE. I am tearing it up re: reading and disposing of my huge stacks of TBR books. It is my most successful reading project ever, and I only started it a couple of weeks ago. I have read half of two books and decided I never wanted to finish them. I have elected to discard two books that I feel would only piss me off anyway (Perelandra and That…

26 Comments

Review: The Mapmaker’s War, Ronlyn Domingue

The Mapmaker’s War is hokey but not in the way I expected it to be. And it is a lot like Ronlyn Domingue’s first book, The Mercy of Thin Air, except with that book’s good qualities deployed in a much less awesome way. All in all I’m glad I didn’t get it for Mumsy for her birthday, because I think she will like A Tale for the Time Being much better. The Mapmaker’s War‘s “magic bean” — a term I’ve stolen from Clare! — is that it’s written in the second person. An older version of the protagonist, Aoife, is…

16 Comments

Review: In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje; or, Talk to me about beautiful prose

Disliking a book I expected to dislike always produces a strange mix of feelings. On one hand, I like being right. On the other hand, I like liking things. I greatly prefer liking things to disliking them. Given the choice, I would elect to like Michael Ondaatje, but the fact is that I just did not. I don’t like it when people indent dialogue instead of punctuating it normally, for one thing. Just punctuate it normally! Why do you think God invented punctuation in the first place? (My stance in favor of normal punctuation has been documented in this space…

39 Comments

Review: The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson (a grumpy review)

What? You say this post showed up in your reader several weeks ago? I have no idea what you’re talking about. My friend the Enthusiast refuses to join work book club because he says we read bad things. As proof of this he says “Devil in the White City was big like six years ago. And you’re just reading it now? Come on! You have to keep up with the times!” In fact the reason I didn’t read The Devil in the White City when it was big was that I was worried about that thing, that hype thing that…

27 Comments

Review: The Aspern Papers, Henry James

Me and Henry James have a quarrel. Our quarrel is that he called Oscar Wilde a fatuous fool and a tenth-rate cad, and when Oscar Wilde’s trials happened, he claimed to feel sorry for him but refused to sign a petition in support of shortening his jail sentence. Number one, those are really lame insults. Number two, it’s painfully obvious from the accounts of their encounters that Henry James was jealous of Oscar Wilde for being smarter and writing more successful plays and getting laid more often. Which is to say, more often than zero times. YEAH I WENT THERE…

20 Comments

Review: Bunheads, Sophie Flack

So there are two books I’ve been trying to get at the library for a very long time without acknowledging to the world how much I wanted them because I feel guilty checking out kids’ books from my library because I always think of all the actual kids in the world who are being deprived of their books by my greed: Bunheads (this one here) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, for which I am still waiting and which may never, ever, ever get in at the library ever. I read a glowing review of the latter on NPR, and the…

24 Comments