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Category: 3 Stars

Reviews: Case Histories, Kate Atkinson / The Invisible Ones, Stef Penney

Okay, my enthusiasm for my TBR shelf has cooled observably. The problem is that when I finish a book on my TBR shelf, I don’t have anywhere else to put it. It just goes back on my TBR shelf because that’s the only available storage. I need to move on selling discarded books to the Strand. I am hoping the Strand will agree to give me store credit instead of cash — they should want to, right? That would be beneficial to them as well as to me? Anyway, a TBR shelf is fun insofar as reading books off of…

35 Comments

Review: Ground Up, Michael Idov

This is a book about a couple who open up a coffee shop on the Lower East Side, with the notion that it will be an upscale Viennese coffee shop, with Viennese pastries and perfect coffee and loyal clients, and Mark and Nina will grow old together as the couple who owns the coffee shop, just like this other sweet old couple who ran a coffee shop that Mark and Nina frequented on their honeymoon to Vienna. This does not work out so well for them. The book is a really quite good satire of snooty New Yorkers (not that…

12 Comments

Review: The Long Song, Andrea Levy

At last I have read something by Andrea Levy! I have been meaning to do so for many moons now, and when my book club decided to go with Angela Carter instead of Andrea Levy for next month, I trotted round to the library and got The Long Song. I wanted Small Island but it turned out I couldn’t be bothered climbing all the way up the stairs to the second floor where they keep the non-new fiction. (I know Long Song came out in 2010. Don’t ask me to explain the new/not new classification system of the New York…

19 Comments

Review: The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus is about two dueling magicians dueling it out in a circus setting. The, uh, the circus happens at night. It’s a night circus. What happened is that there were these two cranky old dudes wanting to see who was smarter, and they each took a protegee, and when the protegees grew up they were to engage in a Massive Magic Battle until one of them won. The consequences for the loser were not stated directly but were strongly implied to be Dire. Celia works as an illusionist at the circus that Marco (kind of) runs. They are…

34 Comments

Review: Falling Together, Marisa de los Santos

I love Marisa de los Santos, LOVE HER. Love Walked In and Belong to Me were two books I didn’t expect to like but have become regulars in my permanent rotation of books that captivate me no matter how many times I reread them (the Harriet Vane books also feature prominently, along with I Capture the Castle and The Chosen). As you may imagine, I was thrilled to hear that she was writing a new book. I wrote a begging letter to HarperCollins asking for a review copy, and they obliged. I shrieked out loud with joy when my book…

13 Comments

Review: The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock

Okay. Here’s what it is. When a book is called The Book of Lies, I I wanted the narrator to be truly, truly unreliable. Unreliable as hell is what I wanted. I wanted her to bleed unreliability. I wanted to never feel sure what was going on, and at the end of the book, I wanted there to be a SHOCKING TWIST where the book told me, Hey, you thought you knew what was going on? Boy were you wrong (a la A Dark-Adapted Eye). That’s what I wanted. I had it in my head that’s what I was going…

26 Comments

River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh

At last, at last! I absolutely loved Sea of Poppies when I read it last summer, and I have been babbling about it a lot since then, especially when in company with Teresa, who loved it first and put me on to it. I have been longing and longing for the second book in the Ibis trilogy to come out for, like, ever. Sea of Poppies ended right when all the characters had finally started hanging out together, and I was so excited to read the new book where they would start out together and interact with each other all…

12 Comments

The Crash of Hennington, Patrick Ness

Today is Ada Leverson‘s birthday. Happy birthday, wonderful Sphinx! We will be friends in heaven! Last week I commented on someone’s blog (I forget whose!) that I thought Patrick Ness should be made the king of something. And I still think that, but I also think that when he’s submitting materials for the consideration of the Academy (the King Deciding Academy, this would be), he shouldn’t necessarily send them The Crash of Hennington unless they expressly ask for it. There’s nothing inside of it that would make them change their minds about him — I was rather surprised to find…

13 Comments

Review: Becoming Shakespeare, Jack Lynch

What I wanted: A corrective emotional experience to How Shakespeare Changed Everything, which I hated. Why I didn’t read Will in the World, which I own and still haven’t read, rather than going to the library to get this: Y’all, I don’t know. I felt like a how their reputation happened sort of a book. My satisfaction level: Moderate. To be fair I don’t think I’d have felt any different if I’d read Will in the World, and perhaps less satisfied because it wouldn’t have been the sort of book I was in the mood for, which, again, was a…

8 Comments