I was determined to finish this book before the end of Halloween which I have now done. This is my bonus book to wrap up the RIP Challenge, which, along with everyone else, I thank Carl for hosting. I’ve had fun reading all my spooky books and reading what everyone else thought of spooky books they read. Lots of Shirley Jackson. Lots of Wilkie Collins. These are the books I read: Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger I’m Looking Through You, Jennifer Finney Boylan The Seance, John Harwood Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn and this one, my bonus one; and…
19 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
My fourth book for the RIP Challenge, because apparently I just cannot get it together to read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher right now. Silent in the Grave is the first of (so far) three mysteries with Lady Julia Grey, whose husband passes away at the start of this book. After his death, private investigator Nicholas Brisbane tells her that he believes her husband was murdered. She rejects this possibility out of hand; but a year later, after her mourning time is over, she finds clues in her house that make her wonder – was he murdered? And if so,…
11 CommentsY’all, I’m applying for graduate school. It is stressful as hell. I’m telling you because the more people I tell, the more shaming it would be for me not to go through with it. And yes! I am using shame as a motivator! If it can beat the crap out of me every time I do something wrong, then by God I can make it work for me to do something constructive AND AWESOME. Since launching on this project of telling everyone, I have outlined my personal statement, asked for two recommendations, started an online application, and found the hard…
31 CommentsI read this book mostly in bed over several nights, while the weather outside was obligingly turning into fall. Although there are things about the cold weather that are miserable (mainly miserable for my hands and feet, which get very poor circulation as my blood is too busy keeping the rest of me warm like a furnace), they are all outweighed by the snuggly loveliness of cuddling down into your bed when it’s cold outside. (It’s not cold outside yet, by the way – just coolish and lovely – but I am anticipating the necessity of getting out my cache…
14 CommentsReading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for Jeane’s DogEar Reading Challenge. I am anxious about food-type books (because I love food), and I was planning to put this off to the very end of October, except someone has a hold on it at the library. So if I don’t read it by 18 October I am out of luck. 11 October 2009 8:30 PM: Exciting. My very first book about food except for Fast Food Nation, which let’s face it, I skipped a lot of that book because it gave me unhappy feelings. I start reading and am…
33 CommentsDon’t you love titles with semicolons? This one’s full name is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In a lot of ways, it’s like And the Band Played On – a medical mystery! The book follows a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 (the year Oscar Wilde was born!), how it began and how it spread, and how a scientist and a vicar tracked it down and discovered how it was transmitted. What had happened was that a baby girl got cholera, and her mother dumped…
8 CommentsMany thanks to Schatzi for the recommendation; I enjoyed it so much. Ballerina is about these two girls, Christine and Stephanie, who are dancers in the same ballet school; upon graduation, they wind up in separate ballet companies but remain quite close. Stephanie has a crazy stage mother who ditched ballet For a Man, and Christine, who is rich, has some sort of medical Condition, severe social anxiety, and parents who never come to see her dance. There are lots of bitchy gay dancers and a slutty Russian guy that Christine and Stephanie get into a big fight over. Heeheehee,…
9 CommentsFrederick Douglass is my hero. Him and Julian of Norwich – an unlikely pair, and I am not really sure what they would make of each other, but there you go. I have been saying for ages that we should put Frederick Douglass on our money. And bump Jackson. Jackson is the obvious choice to get bumped, but I also think we could get rid of Grant, in a pinch – it’s not that I hate him or anything, it’s just that, you know, he wasn’t that amazing a president, and we are already representin’ for the Civil War with…
6 CommentsI recently read Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit, and found it unsatisfyingly lacking in good stories; I have had the opposite problem with Donna Freitas‘s Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Like Regnerus, Freitas is interested in exploring the intersection of religion/spirituality and sex in America’s youth, though she focuses on college students where Regnerus’s book was more interested in teenagers. She conducted interviews with students at different types of universities – Catholic ones, evangelical ones, regular public ones – about their spiritual and sexual lives and those of their community. Many good…
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