A few days ago, my friend tim mentioned Gaudy Night, and I realized that I wanted nothing in the world more than to read Gaudy Night. I know I refused to read it or even think about it earlier this year when I was reading Strong Poison, but I have rarely enjoyed a reread as much as I did this one. Reading Gaudy Night this time was like eating cilantro – you know what it’s going to be like, and you are thinking, man, this is going to be great, but no matter how high your expectations are, you find…
24 CommentsCategory: 5 Stars
The Bible just got bumped off my five desert island books list. Sorry, Bible! It’s just that you have all that stuff about begatting and oysters, and none of my other desert island books take long breaks from being awesome to talk about stoning your disobedient sons! And you know I can’t do without Shakespeare, and The Color Purple and Angels in America are JUST SO EPIC, and Greensleeves is my favorite book of all time. You understand, don’t you? And we can still be friends? I mean when you think about it, way more people would take you to…
9 CommentsI recently reread this book, and I was planning to wait on writing about it until I could see the movie, but the people I see movies with are either like “Are you nuts? I saw it the first instant it came out!” or else “I can’t watch it! The book is too precious to me!” or else (more rarely) “Looks mushy. Let’s go see (500) Days of Summer instead.” (And we did. And it was excellent. But I am still curious about The Time Traveler’s Wife film, because I loved the book so much.) The Time Traveler’s Wife I…
6 CommentsI love a memoir, y’all, and you know what I love more than a memoir? A graphic novel memoir. Delicious. My library has a new section on their ever-growing graphic novels shelf, which is Biography. When I went in yesterday (collecting films for my poor sick little sister and lots of excellent books for me), I took three of the five books from the new wee little section. Including Fun Home – which I remember the library not having last time I checked, and I was well cross about it. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel‘s memoir about her father, a…
11 CommentsWow, Patrick Ness, color me super impressed. Way to create a distinctive, consistent, memorable voice for your protagonist. That isn’t easy. I have not read a book where I enjoyed the narrator’s voice so much since, mm, The Book Thief, and before that The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Which are two of my all-time favorite books. The Knife of Never Letting Go is based on a fantastic premise, that the aliens in this settled world have given the settlers the disease of Noise, which killed all the women and left the men able to hear each other’s thoughts; and then…
22 CommentsI got this at the library because I am always on the hunt for good graphic novels, and it said THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME EVER or something like that on the front. I believed this because I’m easily taken in by the printed word. Fortunately for me, this may actually be one of the best graphic novels of all time ever. I loved it. I really, really loved it. It’s translated – I didn’t even care! Hooray for Joe Johnson, the stalwart translator! Mr. Johnson, you have done an excellent job in translating, and thanks for that,…
9 Comments