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Category: 3 Stars

Art people are so weird.

I read this book The Art Prophets, by Richard Polsky, which is a collection of art criticism essays that talk about dealers who discovered and promoted specific genres of art that weren’t necessarily appreciated straightaway. Like Ivan Karp with pop art, or Stan Lee in comics, Virginia Dwan with earthworks, etc. I read it during jury duty. I had a system. I’d read a couple of chapters of Ada, or Ardor, a couple of essays from The Art Prophets, and then I’d read a trashy novel (you don’t need to know details on the last part. Focus on how I…

14 Comments

Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

Ta-da! At last I have read this book and can proceed, like a year later, to Gone Girl. Seriously, it is almost a year later. You would not believe how long it takes for a hold on a Gillian Flynn book to get in at the library. Dark Places is about the only survivor of a massacre that killed her whole family. At the age of seven, Libby Day testified that she saw her older brother Ben murder her mother and two older sisters. Now she’s in her thirties, running out of money left her by sympathetic well-wishers, and searching…

15 Comments

Review: Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris

Not to blow my own horn, but I totally nailed the first work book club meeting of the New Year. Work book club has been on a hiatus, and we decided in December to reconvene it, so I felt some pressure to make reconvened work book club awesome for everyone. I tried to go with a book everybody would both enjoy and have things to say about, and this book by Joanne Harris felt like a good choice. I know that she’s an enjoyable writer, because I liked Gentlemen and Players, and I also know that she can leave things…

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Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

Here is a story about me and Guy Gavriel Kay. When I first went to college, I met this girl on my hall who liked to read fantasy novels and I was like, Awesome! This is my First College Friend! She lent me The Summer Tree because she said Guy Gavriel Kay was amazing. I tried to read it and ferociously hated it, and then I tried twice more and kept on loathing it every time, so I leaned it up against her door and scampered away, and after that I slightly hid from her whenever I saw her because…

34 Comments

Review: Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl; or, Trusting nonfiction authors

If you don’t care about Unnatural Selection in particular but you are interested in the question of trust/mistrust of nonfiction authors in general, scroll down to here, which is where I stop talking about Unnatural Selection. Because I just figured out how to hyperlink to places in my own post. What what. Technology. Unnatural Selection is a book about how widespread access to abortion in many developing nations has led to a crisis in sex-selective abortion, where the ratio of boys born to girls born — a necessary constant because nobody wins in a sex-skewed society — shifts well out…

33 Comments

An anecdote about an Alexander Pope scheme

Over Thanksgiving break (I know, y’all, I’m the worst at reviewing books promptly), I read this book Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, by Ian Hamilton, which was all about how various authors — nearly all of them public domain folks, nothing super modern and juicy — managed (or failed to manage) their literary estates. Each chapter was a case study, and they were all interesting, and I deeply regret that I didn’t review it when it was still fresh in my mind and I could tell you many anecdotes from it. I AM SORRY.…

19 Comments

Dystopian worlds; and a review of The Uninvited, Liz Jensen

I’ve read a few reviews of Revolution that have said it would be a more interesting show if (well, if several things, but the relevant one here is if) instead of starting fifteen years on from the blackout, it had a chronological plotline starting from the blackout. In fact (said these reviews), very few dystopian world pieces of media really show you how they got there. They’ll talk about how they got there, in greater or lesser degrees of detail, but that won’t be the plot of the story/show/movie/book. There isn’t anything wrong with doing it this way, to be…

18 Comments

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

Project: Read Gillian Flynn’s Books In Order is now one-third complete! Huzzah! Now I just have Dark Places and Gone Girl to go, and I already own one of those. So my project is closer to being, like, three-sevenths complete. It may be some time yet before I get to read Dark Places. I am eleventh of fourteen on the holds list for that one. It’ll happen! Just not right away. I’ll have plenty of time to think about Gillian Flynn in between reading her first and second books. If God truly loves me He’ll send me Dark Places right…

10 Comments

Review: The Elementals, Francesca Lia Block

I’ve never read anything by Francesca Lia Block but I’ve always thought of her as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of authors. This is probably quite unfair, and I liked The Elementals pretty well. If anyone has recommendations of further Francesca Lia Block books I should read, please take to the comments and let me know. My libraries have a number of Francesca Lia Block books for me to read on my Nook, and I have jury duty later this month so I will need plenty of reading material. Ariel Silverman’s best friend Jeni (awesome name, absurd spelling) vanished, and…

21 Comments

Review: Guard Your Daughters, Diana Tutton

The lovely Rachel of Book Snob sent me Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters, a book that is reminiscent of, but not nearly as good as, I Capture the Castle. The five Harvey sisters have grown up rather isolated, with their invalid mother and their father, a famous mystery writer. The eldest, Pandora, was recently married, and now the next two girls, Morgan (our narrator) and Thisbe, are sort of on the lookout for men to marry, even though they have basically never met a man before. Two men show up in pretty short order, and everyone goes into a tizzy.…

23 Comments