The beginning: Hurrah, multiple points of view! (In retrospect, the multiple points of view is probably the reason I added this book to my TBR list in the first place.) Mudbound (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) opens with two brothers, Jamie and Henry McAllan, hastening to dig a grave for their father before the rains start again; while Henry’s wife, Laura, barely conceals her relief at the old man’s death. Then we jump back in time a few years, to the time when Laura and Henry met and married and moved to Mississippi to run a farm there. Laura…
29 CommentsCategory: Unfinished
I have been reading a lot of nonfiction this summer. It’s been fun, but I am also a little starved for fiction, and I have a massive backlist of books to investigate when I get home. Juliet Gardiner: The Thirties and Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here When I read Gardiner’s Wartime, I wished it had said more about the experience of being an American GI in England during World War II. Turns out the reason it didn’t is that Juliet Gardiner wrote a whole book about being an American GI in England during World War II. Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over…
43 CommentsThe jacket copy on the Gene Wolfe books at the library assured me that Gene Wolfe’s most famous books are a series with the word Sun in them, but failed to explain to me which book was the first of that series. Yes, I could have looked it up on the library computers, but I was only getting his books in the first place because he was right there under W, and Sexing the Cherry was not, so I couldn’t be bothered expending a lot of effort. Again I say unto you: It is not a good strategy to get…
18 CommentsI simply cannot get on with Patricia McKillip. I don’t know what it is about her books that displease me. The writing is lovely, her characters are likeable, the plots are interesting – and still, every single time I pick up one of her books, I end up stewing in displeasure and finally asking myself, Jenny, why are you torturing yourself like this? Just put the damn book down and read something else. Winter Rose is a retelling of Tam Lin. I love that story! As previously mentioned, I am reading a bunch of retellings of that story. And there…
10 CommentsI picked this up at the library a little while ago, and realized when I got it home that I had read about it here before checking it out and completely forgotten. Weird. You wouldn’t think I’d be able to manage being uninterested in a memoir about someone whose father was a faith healer. But I just never got interested in this. For someone with such a colorful life, this guy has written a book that was surprisingly bland (yeah, I mixed that metaphor. Got a problem?). Even before I began to suspect that Mr. Smith genuinely believes in his…
Leave a CommentBlech. Everyone’s been reading Susan Hill lately, and her books all sounded so creepy and cool, but I couldn’t finish this. I stayed up late last night reading it, because I kept thinking I would read it until it got interesting and then I would go to sleep and have something to look forward to in the morning. What a stupid idea. I mean, that was always going to be a stupid idea, but it was particularly stupid in this case because the book never got interesting at all. Two-thirds of the way through, I figured out that I was…
1 Comment“Did someone die in here or what?” …. “Yes,” she told Andy, “somebody die die in here but I have, of course, since changed the sheets.” I read about this book here, and felt smugly certain that I would not be, as Powell’s review suggested some would be, “deaf to this novel’s considerable charm”, thus would not have “wandered away long before those scenes [the ones with plot in them] arrive.” They said it was like Jane Austen, and I suppose I thought that meant gently satirical and not very exciting in a Scarlet Pimpernel way, but nevertheless containing various…
Leave a CommentMeh. Everyone kept comparing other books to The Chatham School Affair with favorable-sounding opinions, so I picked it up at the library a little while ago and started reading it, and I have to confess that I found it somewhat trying. I couldn’t get into the story because of all the frantic foreshadowing. It kept being all Little did we know when first we beheld that peaceful landscape how much BLOOD AND DEATH AND MISERY there would be there later on, and I only read a little bit of it, but I just got fed up with the way Mr.…
3 CommentsOkay, I didn’t pick this up wholly at random, but it was the only Ian McEwan book at the library although I actually wanted Atonement to see how different it was to the movie, so that’s why I decided to read this one. Anyway I didn’t finish. I have a massive big stack of library books to read, and this one wasn’t impressing me at all, and I was way way in and still waiting for something to happen, and I hate those books where a dude wakes up in the morning and starts to think all about his entire…
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