Skellig is about a boy called Michael, who finds an angel in his crappy old broken-down garage. Or, to be more precise, in his crappy old broken-down garage, he finds a filthy, exhausted, starving, unfriendly man called Skellig with growths on his back that Michael suspects are wings (which proves to be the case). Michael’s baby sister is very sick, and because he is very worried about her, and can’t help her, he focuses his energies on taking care of Skellig instead. Mina, the strange, clever girl next door, helps him and teaches him about bones and William Blake (two…
6 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
Ah, books about books. I read this because I can’t get ahold of Nick Hornby’s much-touted books about books. Anne Fadiman writes about all kinds of aspects of loving books: marrying libraries, loving your books, plagiarism – all kinds of things. I liked some of these essays a lot – the one about marrying libraries made me wince because I could picture myself agonizing over how to organize and sort out my books with someone else’s. I was interested to read an essay from the perspective of a woman who loves books and doesn’t mind destroying them. (I wrote, destroying…
9 Comments(Finally getting around to reading some of the books I got at the book fair in early March. Stupid library, distracting me.) Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine – at one point she reads about it and discovers it has a 5% survival rate. After ages and ages having this sorted out, she is left with part of her jaw missing. Later on she receives numerous grafts to sort this out, and these work for a while and then keep getting reabsorbed. (I believe that’s how it worked – I’m fuzzy on medical…
Leave a CommentI loved Jump at the Sun. I feel like I’ve loved all the books I’ve read lately, but I just looked at my past few reviews, and no, it hasn’t been that way. I just loved The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox so much it feels like it was a bunch of books; plus, I’ve been reading Jump at the Sun for several days and loving it. I didn’t expect to love it, because I try to steer clear of books about people being miserable and bored with their suburban families and their suburban lives. However, it is only April,…
Leave a CommentSo, okay, admittedly I am having trouble facing the idea of human interaction these days on account of being totally down in the dumps, but still it seems excessive for me to have read all the rest of the Fables volumes since Tuesday night. It went like this: I got the fourth volume from the library near work on Wednesday, read that; went to two different libraries on Thursday to get one and three and read those; then on Saturday I went to Bongs & Noodles and read two, and that evening I went to the main branch of the…
1 CommentMy sister has talked so much about Fables for months (I mean, not ceaselessly, just when it came up), and yes, I mostly ignored her; and I also mostly ignored Nymeth, who has been saying how good Fables is (are?) for a while too. So now I am sorry that I ignored y’all, because I grabbed a volume the last time I was at the library – I really wanted Goodbye, Chunky Rice but they didn’t have it – and I read it last night. It was the fifth volume, which isn’t a genius way to start out a series. …
5 CommentsThis is the hugest book ever. I have been reading it and reading it. It’s about Edward Murrow as you might have imagined, and I will just tell you now that Edward Murrow was quite a person. He wasn’t always perfect (of course), but I admire him tremendously. Everyone I know is now tired of hearing Edward R. Murrow stories. Like the one about when he went to Buchenwald with the troops, and people there – people who were in Buchenwald – recognized him and asked if he remembered them. And the one about how someone asked his four-year-old son…
2 CommentsWhat a lovely book. I didn’t know Edward Murrow had had anything to do with Britain in the War at all, but evidently he and his wife moved there before the war started and stayed after it began. The Murrows came home to America in 1941, just in time for Pearl Harbor, and then they went back to England again, because Edward Murrow wanted to explain America to Britain and the other way around. When I was reading this book, I discovered lots of nice things about Edward Murrow and his lovely wife Janet. For instance, they moved to London…
3 Comments