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Category: 3 Stars

Review: The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe

Not to be confused with The End of Everything! But read roughly around the same time. I know. I was really slow in reviewing this. I am just bad at reviews this years, you guys. I need to institute a system to make myself be more systematic. Rachel (come visit soon, Rachel!) told me that she had to give me a book and for me to tell her what I thought about it, because she had loved it but it also made her really angry, and she wanted to know if my reaction would be the same. It was, except…

12 Comments

Review: The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson

I am late to the Marilyn Johnson party, y’all. I am not fashionably late. I am so late the servers are washing glasses and the other guests have long since departed for the after-party at the library books bar. By which I mean, y’all have probably all already read this and gone on to read This Book Is Overdue, and by now y’all are probably Marilyn Johnson’s agent for her next book about, I don’t know, the lives of book scouts or something. So, sorry. As my mother says, sometimes it be’s that way. The Dead Beat is about obituaries:…

34 Comments

Review: The Sherlockian, Graham Moore

Harold is the youngest ever member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a secretive group of Sherlock Holmes devotees. At his first ever meeting, the preeminent Sherlockian in the world has come to present the lost diary of Conan Doyle, the holy grail of, you know, of Sherlock Holmes dudes. But when the body of the scholar is found strangled in his hotel room, Harold becomes obsessed with finding out the Truth. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago, Arthur Conan Doyle receives a letter bomb, apparently related to his decision to chuck his hero, Sherlock Holmes, off a waterfall. Trying to trace…

40 Comments

Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

Oh this book. Oh it hurt my heart. All the time I was reading it and thinking how it reminded me of an illustrated, more grown-up version of There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, which I read when I was a little kid. I still tear up slightly when I read There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom. Don’t judge. Louis Sachar can’t tug on my heartstrings? Junior lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation, where he regularly gets beaten up because he is a weird kid. He has a stutter and a large head and brain damage from being…

28 Comments

The Peacock Spring, Rumer Godden

As I write this review, I am in a state of near-perfect happiness. I will tell you why. I am sitting in an Oscar Wilde-themed cafe in the West Village, drinking coffee from a teacup and eating a scone with clotted cream and raspberry jam. There is a cafe in the West Village called Bosie (I know, right? What a weird thing to name a cafe!), and it has in the back a framed picture of Oscar Wilde (to recapitulate, I am not making this up), and it has these really lovely scones with jam. I am well aware that…

34 Comments

Review: An Accident in August, Laurence Cossé

My half-assed, unenthusiastic effort to make myself love books in translation continues apace. Yes, I am aware that it is a very very half-assed effort indeed. No, I would probably not have done anything about it had not Europa contacted me to offer me a copy of An Accident in August for review. (Hey FTC! There’s a disclosure encased in that last sentence, if you care to look for it.) On a late night in August 1997, Lou has a minor car accident. Minor for her: the car that sideswipes her crashes spectacularly, and Lou speeds off in terror. The…

24 Comments

Review: The Road Home, Rose Tremain

How long it took me to figure out that the reason I didn’t know what country the protagonist was from was that the country the protagonist was from was never named and may quite well have been intended to be fictional: Two-thirds. Two-thirds of the book. You know why that is? Because I am dumb. The Road Home was a gift from the lovely Fiona of The Book Coop. Fiona’s note said “It did cross my mind briefly to buy you Rose Tremain’s whole works”, and y’all, I have to say I am in great sympathy with this position. If…

25 Comments

Review: The Hottest Dishes in the Tartar Cuisine, Alina Bronsky

It turns out that a TBR shelf was the best idea I ever had. I’ve made the top section of my little bookshelf into a priority-reads shelf. Now when I am wondering what to read, and I think longingly of library books, my TBR shelf is like a stern little taskmaster going “Oh no you don’t, missy. You have all these books right here in your own very room.” And then I read those books instead, and honestly? I bought or asked for most of those books myself. There is no reason to suppose that I will like them any…

24 Comments

Rough Crossings, Simon Schama; or, how to feel decidedly unpatriotic on 4th of July Weekend

What now? 4th of July weekend was ages ago and I am the laziest book blogger ever for only getting around to posting about Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution at the start of August? Fair point. In my defense, I read this book all in one weekend, and if you haven’t been carting a book around on the subway for several days, it hardly even feels like a book you read at all! So I forgot about it. And that’s really not my fault. Because of the subway thing. (No, you’re the lamest excuse ever.…

17 Comments

Review: The Great Night, Chris Adrian

Soooooooooo. So. So. The Great Night. How shall I describe it? The Great Night is like if Neil Gaiman had written A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What’s that you say? He has written “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and it was nothing like this? Then give me a moment to find another analogy. It’s like if Lev Grossman (about whom more in a few days) wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Actually, that analogy is pretty solid. Lev Grossman and Chris Adrian occupy spaces in my head that are not terribly far apart: I might easily recommend either one of them to someone…

5 Comments