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Category: 3 Stars

Review: Intuition, Allegra Goodman

Here is a book I checked out on the recommendation of a few-years-old Best Books of the Year list, the others on the list having appealed to me very little (or else I already read them). It is about a bunch of scientists working at a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discover cures for cancer by trying different things on rats. One researcher, Cliff, begins to have dramatic results with his experiments, and the lab explodes with excitement and papers and research grants. Gradually his colleague and ex-girlfriend, Robin, begins to believe that his results are fraudulent; and her accusation…

9 Comments

Review: The Year of the Gadfly, Jennifer Miller

In October (or, if you are me writing this post, now) I had this cold where I lost my whole entire voice for several days, and I was all sickly to the point that I stayed home from work, and on the day where I stayed home from work, I sat in my bed under blankets, feeling terribly sad, and I read Year of the Gadfly. This is a very uninteresting story to anyone but me. I don’t get sick that often, so to me this story feels terribly sad, like way overblown sad. Unreasonably sad. Like the death of…

14 Comments

The Secret Keeper, Kate Morton

So! Kate Morton! In the past I’ve had some feelings about the way Kate Morton does her plots and sentences. This has bothered me in different degrees for different books — The House at Riverton was close to pure joy (I was reading it on vacation) but did not stand up to rereads, and The Forgotten Garden bugged me with some heavy-handed plot devices. But The Secret Keeper is her fourth book, and some of the tics I didn’t love in the first two I’ve read are gone now, and overall it was a fun, engaging, non-annoying read. As a…

20 Comments

Small reviews

I don’t have as much to say about these two books so I’m putting them in one post. BOOM. Is Everyone Hanging out without Me?, and Other Concerns, Mindy Kaling This is such a good title for a book like this. Which is to say, a collection of short essays about Mindy Kaling’s life and thoughts she has thought on various topics. Mindy Kaling is a charming human person and I think she would be a fun friend. Her book is charming and fun, and slight. She says some charming things about gender performance (but she doesn’t call it gender…

8 Comments

Review: Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women who Love It, Tanya Erzen

Beacon Press, publisher of Fanpire, says: Why have the Twilight saga’s representations of romance and relationships enchanted millions of fans and generated millions in revenue, selling everything from Barbie-type dolls to blockbuster films? Tanya Erzen-herself no stranger to the allure of the series-explores the phenomenon of Twilight, books and films influenced by conservative Mormon religious ideas, by immersing herself in the vibrant and diverse subculture of “Twi-hards” to understand why so many love the series (sometimes in spite of themselves). She attends Edward-addiction groups, Twi-rock concerts, and fan conventions, and looks at the vast world of online fandom that Twilight has…

20 Comments

Review: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean Howe

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a history of Marvel Comics’ superhero comics from its beginnings in the early 1960s all the way up to the present day. Superhero comics started at Marvel as a response to the success of such DC characters as the Green Lantern and the Justice League; and the inventor of most of them in the early days was (at least partly! this was the subject of much dispute!) Stan Lee, the cousin of Marvel’s owner’s wife. So if you say you don’t like nepotism, remember that without it we wouldn’t have the gorgeous Gwendie. What…

29 Comments

Review: Black Water Rising, Attica Locke

Sooooooooo. This is mixed. Not mixed in the way like that everything about it was neutral to me. Mixed in the way that some things about it were neutral to me, some things about it I loved so, so hard, and all of me thinks Attica Locke’s second book sounds m.f. amazing and I want to read it. I realize that is a very specific kind of mixed, but I want y’all to know exactly where my head’s at. Jay Porter is a lawyer and one-time civil rights worker in 1980s Houston. When he and his pregnant wife help out…

13 Comments

Review: The Magician’s Book, Laura Miller

I’ve had this book since December 2010. Not in that generic bought-a-book-and-forgot-about-it-until-a-TBR-challenge-happened kind of way, but in the sense that I constantly saw it on the shelf and struggled with fierce opposing forces within my soul. Arrayed on one side of the battle were the numerous things about this book that appealed to me: Laura Miller, founder of Salon.com, a website I regularly read and enjoy; the Chronicles of Narnia, the books that taught me what stories are supposed to be like; writing about books; critical analysis by intelligent people of literature I love; etc. On the other side was…

44 Comments

Review: Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce

I have a strong but mostly theoretical affection for stories about fairies. I say “mostly theoretical” because I do not often find myself pleased by books that deal with these topics. Of books that bother about The Faerie Realm, the reigning champion is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which manages the necessary but apparently really difficult task of making the world of faerie interesting, creepy, and specific. Other books I have loved that have Faerie Realms in them (like Fire & Hemlock) tend to shunt the faerie realms off to the side and just hint at what’s going on in…

18 Comments

Review: The Art of Making Magazines

Magazine-making is a career not far off from my own that I am not sure I would like to attempt. Fact-checking maybe. Copyediting yes because I am amazing at copyediting. Quickly because this is great: Robert Gottlieb was writing about the differences in editing for books and for magazines, and he told a story about this one copyeditor called Miss Gould, who was the queen, evidently, of all the copyeditors. When she would mark up a proof, it would be so brutal in its mark-up-edness that most authors could not be permitted to see it, because the radiance of the…

9 Comments