I am a sucker for an epistolary novel. I will read anything epistolary, even something so patently ridiculous as Clarissa. (Yes, I’ve read Clarissa. Yes, it was really silly. I have recently learned there was a BBC adaptation of it with Sean Bean and since I have for Sean Bean feelings that teeter on the boundary between man-crush and proper real crush, I will be checking that out from the library ASAP.) When Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkeysee blog mentioned Which Brings Me to You on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (the only podcast I listen to because it…
18 CommentsCategory: 2 Stars
This marks the first time I have ever read Wuthering Heights without needing it to be Jane Eyre. And I hope Wuthering Heights appreciates that I made sacrifices in order to read it with eyes and mind uncontaminated by my frantic, abiding, decades-long love of Jane Eyre. That Mia Wasikowska movie came out and I went to see it and afterwards I really, really wanted to read Jane Eyre, and it just so happens I have a beautiful copy of Jane Eyre with gorgeous woodcut illustrations, which Legal Sister got for me and then wiped down every page with a…
59 CommentsMiscellanea: Colum McCann and Colm Toibin are the same person in my head. I now feel pleased with myself for finally reading something by Colm Toibin. Also, I find it impossible not to write Colum McCann’s name as Column. Why I read the end: I realized halfway through the book that nothing in it had interested me enough to make me read the end. I still didn’t care enough to read the end, but I did because I didn’t want to be untrue to my byline. Also because I felt like as a new New Yorker, I should love a…
29 CommentsWhen I was telling my friend tim about the plot of this book, the title of which I did not mention, she said, “Oh hey! It sounds like The Makropoulis Case,” which evidently is an opera by a Czech composer I’ve never heard of because I am very, very ignorant of all things opera-related. I went and read the Wikipedia article on the opera in question, and the moral of the story is that if you are going to read a book that is an homage to an opera, you should (a) know going in that it is an homage…
34 CommentsWell. This is not what I expected. Amanda reviewed this series, of which Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic are the first two, earlier this year, and they are boarding school books and the series is a bunch of books that are matching and color-coded. Y’all know I had to get some of that. How, you inquire, did I manage to resist for eight months? By my home library always having them checked out, that’s how! But I got the first two at Mid-Manhattan when I came into the city last weekend to see the statues at…
30 CommentsNope, not talking about the Senator from Minnesota (that’s weird, right? The lines between entertainment and politics are weirdly thin these days. Was it always thus?). I am talking about the books I have been reading lately, which have been full of people who lack integrity. Now I am ready to read about Betsy and Tacy, whose biggest deceptions involved reading Lady Audley’s Secret on the sly (I just wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That would be legitimately inappropriate for a twelve-year-old). The Sealed Letter, Emma Donohue After I read Room (yeah, yeah, I read it), I thought it might be…
31 CommentsWARNING: If you are not interested in Oscar Wilde and his life and friends and everything, and you do not want to read this post, I totally understand. But do yourself a favor if that is the case, skip to the end of it and read the poem in block quotes. It’s magnificent and I want to read it every day for the rest of my life. The full title of this book is really Alfred Douglas: A Poet’s Life and His Finest Work, but I couldn’t put that for a few reasons, the first one being that as far…
17 CommentsMy older sister is a big fan of the simple food. She likes rice, and cheese, and meat. You would think that Mexican food would be perfect for her, since it’s all just different ways of putting together rice and meat and cheese and sometimes potatoes and beans. But she hates Mexican food. All of it. Won’t eat it. The ingredients are perfect for her, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. That is how I felt about Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans. Its component parts were all good: Matthew Kneale, award-winning author; family…
25 Comments