If you are extremely attentive in a way that I am not, you may have noticed that I haven’t yet done a post on the second half of Doctor Zhivago. I finished the first half a few days ahead of schedule, and as a reward I let myself read some fun fiction, and one thing led to another and by the time the end of November rolled around I just hadn’t picked up Doctor Zhivago again. To compensate for being a bad readalong participant, and a bad reader who cannot appreciate classics of Russian literature, I checked out Elif Batuman’s…
35 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
What was I reading recentlyish that talked about the Dark Ages being defined by the lack of Homer and Ovid? Was it The Secret History? Or The Fall of Rome maybe? Probably it was Tom Stoppard, Arcadia or The Invention of Love. It sounds like the kind of thing Tom Stoppard would say. Anyway, whatever character it was, they said something about how the Dark Ages were Dark because we didn’t have the classics around, in all their universal brilliance, to explain us to ourselves. When the West got them back again (thanks, Arabia!), it was like being reborn, a…
35 CommentsI am a fan of delayed gratification. You may not know this about me because, for instance, I whined so much about not having Monsters of Men handed to me the identical second that I finished reading The Ask and the Answer. You may suppose that a girl who reads the end of books before she reads the middle, and interrupts cross-stitching a Christmas stocking for her little cousin to find out from Television Without Pity what is going to happen in the last twenty minutes of the episode of The Good Wife she is watching, is not a girl…
37 CommentsNope, not talking about the Senator from Minnesota (that’s weird, right? The lines between entertainment and politics are weirdly thin these days. Was it always thus?). I am talking about the books I have been reading lately, which have been full of people who lack integrity. Now I am ready to read about Betsy and Tacy, whose biggest deceptions involved reading Lady Audley’s Secret on the sly (I just wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That would be legitimately inappropriate for a twelve-year-old). The Sealed Letter, Emma Donohue After I read Room (yeah, yeah, I read it), I thought it might be…
31 CommentsI’ve said before that I like the kind of novel where you have two sets of characters in two different time periods, and the novel goes back and forth between them. Especially when one of the sets of characters (the modern one) is researching the other set (the old-time-y one.) So when I saw that Jennifer Donnelly, beloved of the blogosphere (that is you) for her Rose books and then Northern Lights, had written a book of this sort, I was…well, I was mildly intrigued. I thought I might get it from the library sometime if I remembered to. Then…
42 CommentsInitially I had it in my head that both of the books my library had on the subject of the Black Panther Party (that I wanted – they had some older books, but I wanted shiny new ones with slightly more time perspective and declassified FBI documents, I hoped) were published by the University of Alabama Press. And I was going to say a few words about how fun it was for me to watch the Alabama quarterback being sacked over and over last night by South Carolina, almost funner than seeing my alma mater win after pulling a very…
22 CommentsIf I may borrow a phrase from Renay, this book punched me in the soul. I have a thing where anything about slavery and civil rights struggles and that business immediately makes my heart hurt and then when the inevitable family member dies or gets sold or whatever, I cry and cry, and that’s why I don’t really read that many historical fiction books from those periods. But Jill said The Rock and the River was good, and I happened to see it at the library, so there you go. I had the hugest lump in my throat from page…
51 Comments