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Reading the End Posts

WordPress being a jerk; and, give me books to read!

WordPress is being a jerk, and everyone is having commenting problems. Teresa from Shelf Love has a post about what’s going on. Feel free to contact WordPress (not this minute; tomorrow) and express your displeasure. I am displeased. More importantly, my mumsy is displeased. Knock it off, WordPress! Cease at once to displease my mama! Secondly, I don’t know what to read. A while ago, I begged you to tell me something Awesome to read, and the lovely trapunto told me to read Kage Baker’s Company series, and it was all awesome all the time. (Well, almost all the time.)…

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Review: The Twisted Thread, Charlotte Bacon; and a question about a literary trope with which I have lost patience

The Twisted Thread is a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of, but it was marked as a book about boarding school in the library catalogue so I was all over that. It’s boarding school + MURDER + pregnancy scandal, with a side order of class tension, and you guys, I like all those things. Hence it was an excellent book for several days on the subway, though it never reached the point where it was so absorbing I couldn’t put it down and had to read it while brushing my teeth and cooking and…

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Review: Entwined, Heather Dixon

“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is one of several fairy tales that I truly love and only rarely find satisfying adaptations of. That isn’t a criticism of the world and its life choices, exactly, because I can see how “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” would be difficult to adapt well. It’s an odd little story, and the ending’s not the best ever, and even when I do read adaptations of it, I rarely feel they’ve done a good job exploring the potential of the original story. That was the case with Entwined, even though I did enjoy it. Azalea is the oldest…

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

I thought Leap Day would be an excellent day to post about Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a story about things that might or might not be real, and events that happen inside and outside of time. My sister (Indie Sister!) gave this to me for Christmas, and I actually read it a while ago but missed reviewing it in one of my reviewing flurries. So I shall talk about it now instead! Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is about a boy called Jacob who was traumatized by the sudden, violent death of his grandfather. He remembers seeing a…

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Review: Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

I went to the library the other day and got all the available books classified under the heading “Boarding schools — Fiction”. Sometimes a girl gets a craving. Prep is about a Midwestern girl called Lee who goes to a fancy Massachusetts preparatory school, Ault, where she feels terribly out of place because she is from the Midwest and because she is not rich but is on a scholarship. Because it might actually be against the rules of literature to write about a girl at a fancy boarding school who comes from the same background as all her peers. Here…

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The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille

This book was so cool! (Except for the unacceptable way there was no index. What nonfiction book skips indexing??) But it should stand as a lesson in the importance of titles. This is a dreary title, isn’t it? I got the book at the library in a very grudging spirit, because I wanted to read loads of books about conservation and cultural property controversies and archaeological ethics and all that sort of thing, but they didn’t have very many books like that (see previously No Bone Unturned and Stealing History for the only other two books I could find on…

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Review: Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

Ah plays. I bought Copenhagen in 2009 at the glorious glorious book sale in my hometown (oh my God that book sale, I dream about it sometimes) because it was fifty cents or something and I like plays, and then I chronically didn’t read it for a year and a half, and then I moved to New York and left it behind because I didn’t love it because I hadn’t read it, and then in January when I was at the library getting plays I was all, Dammit, I need to read this damn play. So I checked it out…

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Acquisitions

I’ve been thinking about acquiring books lately. On Tuesday my coworker said that what she really wanted was a really well-written book, Lit’rature she said, with a compelling plot and interesting characters. I thought about it for a while, threw out a couple of ideas, and ultimately said, “Stop, stop, call off the hounds. It’s Fingersmith. Read Fingersmith.” And that evening she went and bought Fingersmith. This is an example of something I would almost never do, buy a book because someone I knew said it was good. I especially would not do it if, as in her case, I…

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Review: No Bone Unturned, Jeff Benedict

The problem with nonfiction is that I always want specialized stuff and the libraries don’t want me to have it. Or, the other problem with nonfiction might be, there’s just not enough of it out there. I wanted to read loads more books about looting and other cultural property issues, because I enjoyed Stealing History and was interested in the issues it raised. I don’t think I appreciated it enough for portraying the complexities of the issues, like the compromises archaeologists have to make with collectors if they want to have any opportunity whatsoever to study looted antiquities. Then I…

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Books I don’t remember well enough to speak intelligently about them

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World, by Roger Atwood, was a very interesting book all about looters and what gets lost when ancient sites are torn up and their contents sold off to wealthy collectors around the world. It used Peru as a focus to discuss the global problems of looting and collecting, but my main takeaway from it is that the Met is a big jerk about repatriating local artifacts. And now when I go to the Met and don’t pay full price, which I’m entitled to do because the admission fee is…

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