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Category: 4 Stars

Review: Children of the Waters, Carleen Brice; or, A nearly unified theory of everything (that makes me enjoy a book)

Two things: One, I really really liked this book. Two, I love the Wish List feature on Overdrive. Overdrive is a flawed and buggy system that forces you to use a very buggy program to access its content (Adobe Digital Editions you are the worst), but it is awesome to be able to add things to my TBR pile with just a click and access them anywhere with an internet connection. I know this sounds slightly like I am doing a commercial for OverDrive, but I’m not. It is my genuine opinion. If OverDrive were paying me to say nice…

27 Comments

The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker

I stealth-borrowed The Age of Miracles from my friend the Enthusiast on a day when he wasn’t at work and I forgot my Nook at home. The subway ride with nothing to read was so unbearably boring I wanted to rip all of my hair out of my head just to have something to do. The Enthusiast has one and a half shelves full of readable books at his cubicle, but I didn’t want most of them. I almost borrowed Coetzee’s Disgrace, but luckily Lil Liv Tyler, who sits at the desk across from the Enthusiast, warned me that (spoilers,…

34 Comments

Review: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright

I am pleased with myself in re: this book because I placed an e-hold on it before my library actually acquired an e-copy, which means I got to check it out as soon as their e-copy arrived. I don’t know how long I’d really have had to wait for it if I hadn’t done this, but I choose to believe it would have been, like, months. And that I am a genius for placing an early hold and getting my greedy paws on it early. But you are not reading this post because you want to know what process I…

27 Comments

Review: Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, edited by Mary Roach

To be clear — because I got confused about this — this is not Best American Science Writing 2011, which is a whole other thing. It also does not feature the best of American science and nature writing published in 2011. The book is from 2011, the writing is all from 2010. I think that could be made clearer, but whatever, I am not the boss of this series. I got this because, please don’t judge me, I did a search on OverDrive for “science” and this is one of the things that came up. I just felt like some…

26 Comments

Revisiting Harry Potter: Not your most flattering side

I was not disappointed in Chamber of Secrets when I read it, but that’s only because I didn’t know the glory that was awaiting me in Prisoner of Azkaban. I remember finishing up the first Harry Potter book and feeling like someone had bashed me over the head with an awesome stick, and I demanded my mother take me to Books-a-Million so I could buy the second book the next day. I called ahead to reserve a copy, which made me feel very adult, and when I got to the help desk at the store, the guy was like, “Huh?…

47 Comments

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King (plus a giveaway)

ETA: If you are coming here from Ana’s link round-up, this is still happening! If you’re interested in a copy of Green Grass Running Water, leave a comment and I will pick names on the morning of 11 February. So Ana and Iris are hosting a Long-Awaited Reads Month in January! I intended to read something much more ambitious for it, but honestly, I have been awaiting Green Grass, Running Water longer than almost anything on my TBR list. Part of me had given up hope that I’d ever be able to read it because the library never has it.…

19 Comments

The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard; plus a question about collective narrators

READ THIS EVERYONE. READ THIS BOOK. Because I want to know if you would like it as much as I did. I really liked it an awful lot. I like it more and more the more I think about it, though I was not blown away as I was reading it. Sometimes when I’m writing a review, I’ll find that I’m talking myself out of whatever book I’m writing about. As I enumerate the book’s flaws, I’ll realize that they were pretty damning, after all, and that although I enjoyed aspects of the book, I won’t ever want to return…

32 Comments

Review: Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein

My family is fond of proposing slightly morbid hypotheticals over dinner. Well, Mumsy and Indie and Social Sisters and Captain Hammer and I are fond of this, and Legal Sister is sometimes fond of it and sometimes acts like she thinks we’re nuts and needs to be talked into participating. Daddy usually gazes at us like we are crazy. We like to discuss which sister would get chosen in a Sophie’s Choice situation (it would definitely be Legal Sister, because Social and Indie Sisters are frail flowers, and I am just not that brave). Or who we would pick to…

43 Comments

Review: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm

I think what I love about Janet Malcolm’s biographical writing is that she’s not, properly speaking, writing a biography. I don’t have a lot of patience for biographies (Oscar Wilde biographies excepted); even the best ones tend to have moments where they’re plodding along through the question of what subjects the person took at university, and how they got on in their first job and their second job and their third job before discovering what they were truly meant for. Janet Malcolm — in The Silent Woman and now in Two Lives — is writing not the story of her…

13 Comments

Review: The Replacement, Brenna Yovanoff

Happy All Saints’ Day! More to the point, happy anniversary, Saints! I will always love you no matter what. I am writing this post in mid-October, but I am predicting that I ended up doing nothing for Halloween. I am not a big fan of Halloween ever since I stopped trick-or-treating. I’m not good at designing costumes. Now Halloween is just one more obstacle between me and Christmas. Ah changelings. I was griping the other day about the difficulty of creating a fairy world that has enough specificity to satisfy me, and although The Replacement doesn’t completely nail this, it…

16 Comments