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Category: 5 Stars

Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers

Poor old Have His Carcase! I read it in a bad temper in 2009 and wrote a terse little post about it that didn’t come close to giving it its due. This time around, the normal thing happened, which is that I grabbed it to read while I was brushing my teeth, became addicted, and ended up reading all three Vane-Wimsey books. (Not Busman’s Honeymoon, I don’t like the mystery in that one.) Having just finished Gaudy Night, I am sorry that I criticized Peter for pestering Harriet to marry him. He is actually quite a good character, and for…

35 Comments

Review: The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm

Before I commence the promised raving about The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s book about (sort of) Sylvia Plath, I will state my position on Sylvia Plath. I like some of her poems a crazy lot and some of her (extremely famous) poems (like “Daddy”) not that much at all. I have read very few Ted Hughes poems but have always disliked the ones I did read. One time when I saw the two of them referred to as “the Hugheses” in a modern college syllabus, I became massively enraged on Sylvia Plath’s behalf. I think Ted Hughes was a cad…

19 Comments

Review: Persian Fire, Tom Holland (or, awesome stories)

May I tell you a story about Athens? Please be aware that you can’t answer “no” to this question, because there is no chance at all of my not telling you this story about Athens. Once upon a time, there was an Athenian king called Pisistratus. Pisistratus was a pretty good king, but like many pretty good kings he had two not-so-goodish sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, who took charge of Athens after Pisistratus died. Hipparchus died (that’s a whole other story), and Hippias was an awful king, so this fellow Cleisthenes went trotting round to Sparta and asked them please…

37 Comments

Sleep No More (theater production)

I show my ticket, a blue six of spades, and I am dropped off on the top floor. (I think it’s the top floor. I keep losing track.) The audience members all wear white masks and are bound to silence. There is definitely a forest on this floor, and a couple on the dance floor dancing a polka. Aha! They must be the Macbeths! They stop dancing and embrace like bears, then take off in opposite directions. I have read that it’s best to follow one actor for as long as possible, so I go chasing after Lady Macbeth. She…

31 Comments

Review: Nox, Anne Carson

Yes, I bought it. I bought it, and it was amazing. Y’all talked me into it. I was stacking the deck, really, by asking for advice from a bunch of people who I know can’t stick to their own book-buying bans, let alone propose that others do so. It’s like when I call up Social Sister to ask her if I should buy a pair of cute shoes. To recapitulate, Nox is a version of the journal Anne Carson made after her brother died. They had been estranged for years, and she heard of his death several weeks after it…

26 Comments

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon; trans. Lucia Graves

Y’all. What is wrong with me? This isn’t a rhetorical question. What really is wrong with me? Lovely Kristen of We Be Reading, one of my favorite people in the blogosphere and fellow Diana Wynne Jones lover, gave me this book as part of her blogiversary giveaway last summer, and I am only just getting to it now. What? Why am I like this? I was fully aware that this was a delightful adventurey booklover’s novel, and yet I let it sit around my Louisiana room for months and months, and then I let it sit around my New York…

64 Comments

Room, Emma Donoghue (a guest review by Mumsy)

If you’ve reviewed Room lately, I’ve probably commented on your blog to say, You have reviewed this book well, but it sounds way too upsetting and I am never, ever, ever, ever going to read it myself. That is still (probably) true, so my mother has kindly agreed to guest-review it for me. Here is Mumsy! (The review on the cover of my copy of Room says: “Potent, darkly beautiful, revelatory.” I have no idea what that even means.) To Ma, Room is a twelve-by-twelve nightmare prison, the scene of repeated rapes and beatings since she was kidnapped at nineteen.…

14 Comments

Review: Devices and Desires, K. J. Parker

Why, why, why would my library purchase one book in a trilogy and not the other ones? Why, library, why? In my library’s defense, it has managed to lose its copy of Devices and Desires too, so unless you were searching on the library catalogue, you’d have no way of knowing the library owns anything but Purple and Black and The Company by K. J. Parker, and you would not therefore be disappointed to be unable to find Devices and Desires on the shelf. Happily for me, a copy showed up on PaperbackSwap at an ideal moment. But that doesn’t…

34 Comments

Review: Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness

Dear heavenly God. This book. Listen, everyone: Monsters of Men is being released in America on the 28th. That gives you just about enough time to go get the first two books in the series, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, and read them before Monsters of Men comes out. I strongly advise this course of action if you have not already read the series. Do it now. You will thank me later. I started writing this post during Book Blogger Appreciation Week, and that feels fitting because if there is any set of…

63 Comments