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Reading the End Posts

Some stuff I read on public transportation

Y’all, I wish I could teleport. If I had back the two hours a day I currently spend getting to and from work, I would be the awesomest book blogger instead of the very lamest. I have been going back and forth and forth and back to work and to visit friends-and-relations, and these are good times to read but it is not the funnest reading time because I’m slightly on edge from being in transit (trains are very peaceful and pleasant, but buses and subways are not). And I would like to be using that time to catch up…

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Elinor Lipman: The Continuing Saga

I have read all but one of the available Elinor Lipman books following my great success with The Family Man. And I am now pleased to report that Elinor Lipman has gone on my Favored Authors list. She is the kind of author you want to have on your shelves for when you wake up at night with terrible nightmares (or even just fretful stress dreams), or when you need an undemanding book to read ten pages of while you’re brushing your teeth at night. Not all of these books share the feature of The Family Man that the good…

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Dream-casting the Chaos Walking books

I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages and I kept on forgetting. Now we have discovered that Charlie Kaufman is writing The Knife of Never Letting Go movie, it feels timely for me to talk about my dream cast for these movies. This is going to be a little indulgent, but you know how there are some days when you are an unstoppable good idea machine, and your ideas please you so much that no amount of praise for your genius can ever be enough? Well, that’s what happened to me when my adjunct sister Lil Splotch posted…

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Review: The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Here’s what happened. The lovely and beautiful Jeanne, who has probably the best blog name out there and is also just an awesome person, sent me The Gone-Away World for my birthday last year. It came in the mail and was a complete and delightful surprise, and I was so touched, and I started reading The Gone-Away World right away because Jeanne said it was one of her favorite books ever. Immediately had no idea what the hell was happening. There were, like, pigs? And some sort of pipe disaster that maybe had…

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Archer’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones

March has whizzed by in a whirlwind of cherry blossoms and other even lovelier events, doing me a great disservice by never letting me catch my breath long enough to schedule a post about a Diana Wynne Jones book for the Diana Wynne Jones March operated by the wonderful Kristen of We Be Reading. March has happened so fast I didn’t even remember to relish March 4th, the only day of the year that’s a command. Ordinarily I say “March forth!” with tedious frequency on that day, and this year I forgot. Sigh. March, you whirlwind vixen. Archer’s Goon, fittingly…

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The Thorn and the Blossom, Theodora Goss

Over the past five years or so, I have discovered in myself a strong and enduring attraction for BOOKS IN BOXES. By which I mean, not that really delightful moment when you have finished a move and you finally get the joy of unpacking your books and organizing them as you see fit (although that is awesome), but rather books that come in boxes. I love box sets of books that go together, especially as a box set means the books all match, which I also love; and possibly even more, I love books that for some reason just happen…

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Review: The Family Man, Elinor Lipman

Well, this was an unexpected delight. I picked up The Family Man at the library on impulse because I was stuck between two other library browsers in the L section (one had kids and one was in a wheelchair so I felt rude demanding they move for me) and waiting for one of them to clear the aisle, and I thought I had heard Lipman’s name before, and my bag felt empty and sad. Elinor Lipman’s name sounded familiar, and Then She Found Me — which the jacket of The Family Man said Elinor Lipman had also written — sounded…

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Review: Before I Go to Sleep, S. J. Watson

Thanks, blogosphere, for having the exact opinion of Before I Go to Sleep that I had my own self. As usual y’all were right about everything. Before I Go to Sleep is about a woman called Christine who developed amnesia following some sort of accident (she can’t remember). Every morning when she wakes up, her memories of the previous day are gone. She doesn’t remember her husband Ben, or her doctor, or any of her friends or experiences from her old life. On a good day she can remember as recently as her college years. Every day, Ben patiently explains…

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Review: The Nobodies Album, Carolyn Parkhurst

Author Octavia Frost has come up with the idea of rewriting the endings to each of her previous seven novels, and to put all the revised endings together as a brand new book, called The Nobodies Album. As she is traveling to deliver the manuscript to her agent, she sees a news item saying that her estranged son, Milo, has been arrested for murdering his girlfriend Bettina. Octavia and Milo (who is a rock star) have not spoken in four years, for reasons that are not immediately made clear; but when she sees that her son is in trouble, she…

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