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Category: 3 Stars

Review: Blackout, Connie Willis

Okay then, Connie Willis. Maybe we can be friends after all. Maybe. Connie Willis writes books about Oxford historians who practice their historianship by going time traveling in their period of interest. I read The Doomsday Book a while ago, and did not care for it because I was bored by the characters, and I hate the Black Death, which is the protagonist historian’s period of interest. Yawn. I regretted not liking it better, because the premise felt like gold. Time-traveling and academics at Oxford? Gold. Blackout has been garnering rave reviews all over the place, with warnings about the…

53 Comments

Review: The Rescue Artist, Edward Dolnick

Y’all may recall the time that Edvard Munch’s The Scream got stolen. Remember that? Nope, not the 2004 time (the one I actually do remember). The 1994 time, the 1994 version of the painting. It was eventually recovered through a sting operation executed by the Norwegian and British police, and aided by the Getty Museum. If I were the Getty Museum, I would be telling other museums about this constantly in mock-casual tones: “Tchyeah, the time that we recovered The Scream for the National Gallery in Norway, that was good times….what’s that, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? Your paintings are still…

26 Comments

Three Black Swans, Caroline B. Cooney

Indie Sister and I are painfully addicted to Caroline B. Cooney’s young adult novels. Especially Indie Sister. Indie Sister would walk five miles in the snow to get a Caroline B. Cooney novel she hasn’t read yet. Over the Christmas holiday, she even wrote a letter to Caroline B. Cooney, although I suspect Caroline B. Cooney will read her letter and think that Indie Sister is eight years old, mentally challenged, or mercilessly mocking her (excerpt: “My other favorite of your books was Code Orange, because scabs are gross — ew”). But in truth, Indie Sister unironically loves Caroline B.…

49 Comments

Review: I Kill Giants, Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. I will never stop sighing. Every time my eye falls on this book, I heave a huge sigh. Oh, expectations. I am your slave and you always make my life more difficult if you possibly, possibly can. Why are you like this? It has been ten thousand years since I read a graphic novel that made my heart sing. Yes. Ten thousand. That’s how many years it has been. I haven’t read a graphic novel that made my heart sing since the year 7990 BCE. Unless Gunnerkrigg Court and The Unwritten count. Just, like, no graphic…

57 Comments

Review: Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, David Levithan and Rachel Cohn

How good for there to be a sweet little book about Christmas in New York City for me to read after my first Christmas season in New York City (the first of many!). I found this book for $1 at the Strand, which is all very fitting for a book that starts with its protagonist finding something unexpected at the Strand. I selflessly gave it to my mother and didn’t even read it before giving it to her because that’s the kind of angelic saintlike daughter I am. But then I swiped it from her two seconds after Christmas and…

43 Comments

Review: A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin

Phew. Finally. I was reading this book for a good, ooh, three weeks I guess, before I finished it at last. Now I know a lot more things than I knew previously about the formation of the modern Middle East, but still not a lot. As with Three Empires on the Nile, much of the information contained in A Peace to End All Peace went in one eye and out the other. (That’s a gross image but “ear” doesn’t work with reading, so, er, sorry.) A Peace to End All Peace is about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and…

28 Comments

Inventing George Washington, Edward G. Lengel

Books about perceptions of history and historical figures have abounded in my life lately, and I love them. Forever. Heather recently reviewed a book about how the impact of the Moses story on American culture, which I am planning to read soon; I got this book about how the treatment of various events in American history has changed in history textbooks over the years; and then there was Contested Will, which dealt with the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy. In the few months when I thought I was going to write a senior thesis in college, it was going…

24 Comments

Review: Sisterhood Interrupted, Deborah Siegel

What is it about infighting that I find so enthralling? Siegel suggests that American culture has a fetish for girls (women) fighting, and that’s certainly true, but in my case I am just very interested in the distinctions people draw between the groups they belong to, and the nominally similar groups they insist they couldn’t be more different from. I am reminded of Lucas in Empire Records: “Some people say it doesn’t make a difference, but I say it’s the difference that makes it.” Lucas is talking about vinyl, but the principle is, I feel, a universal one. Sisterhood Interrupted…

22 Comments

Review: After the Falls, Catherine Gildiner

Here are two recommendations to further your happiness: 1. Go read Too Close to the Falls. It is a lovely, touching, frequently laugh-out-loud funny memoir about Catherine Gildiner’s childhood in Lewiston, New York, and her friendship with her father’s delivery man, Roy. I cannot say enough good things about it. Toward the end, it gets quite a bit sadder, but the rest of the book is so wonderful that I did not really mind. Gildiner’s account of stabbing a classmate with a compass and being taken to a psychologist for evaluation is one of the funniest bits of life writing…

27 Comments

Review: The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton

Have y’all ever seen Wonderfalls? If you haven’t, you really should. It’s basically Dead Like Me with a better premise, a better ensemble cast (absolutely no disrespect meant to Mandy Patinkin, whom I adore — it’s the dynamics between the characters that are better, really), and a stronger sense of what kind of a show it is. Where Dead Like Me gets a bit too grim, and Pushing Daisies can be a little too sweet, Wonderfalls finds the perfect balance. Naturally it’s the one of the three that ran for the shortest time. Anyway, there is this scene in Wonderfalls…

54 Comments