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Reading the End Posts

Review: The Long Song, Andrea Levy

At last I have read something by Andrea Levy! I have been meaning to do so for many moons now, and when my book club decided to go with Angela Carter instead of Andrea Levy for next month, I trotted round to the library and got The Long Song. I wanted Small Island but it turned out I couldn’t be bothered climbing all the way up the stairs to the second floor where they keep the non-new fiction. (I know Long Song came out in 2010. Don’t ask me to explain the new/not new classification system of the New York…

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Zone One, Colson Whitehead

There are certain writers in New York who seem to be everywhere but with whose work I am unfamiliar. On the weekend of Halloween, I decided to start making inroads. I am leery of Nicole Krantz, and I am actively unfond of JFranz so decided to go with Colson Whitehead, as I know nothing to his discredit and think he has cool hair. It was Halloween weekend, the weather was going to be a bit slushy (I innocently thought), and altogether it seemed like the perfect weekend for staying in and reading Colson Whitehead’s new zombie book, Zone One. But…

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Review: The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus is about two dueling magicians dueling it out in a circus setting. The, uh, the circus happens at night. It’s a night circus. What happened is that there were these two cranky old dudes wanting to see who was smarter, and they each took a protegee, and when the protegees grew up they were to engage in a Massive Magic Battle until one of them won. The consequences for the loser were not stated directly but were strongly implied to be Dire. Celia works as an illusionist at the circus that Marco (kind of) runs. They are…

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Review: Falling Together, Marisa de los Santos

I love Marisa de los Santos, LOVE HER. Love Walked In and Belong to Me were two books I didn’t expect to like but have become regulars in my permanent rotation of books that captivate me no matter how many times I reread them (the Harriet Vane books also feature prominently, along with I Capture the Castle and The Chosen). As you may imagine, I was thrilled to hear that she was writing a new book. I wrote a begging letter to HarperCollins asking for a review copy, and they obliged. I shrieked out loud with joy when my book…

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Amy was right

This Amy here. She was right all along. And so were all the other people who have been saying that The Vampire Diaries (wait, don’t leave yet! Hear me out!) is awesome. As it turns out? It is pretty awesome.  I started watching it right after the CW signed a deal with Netflix — thanks, CW! — because I thought it would be a fun show to semi-watch, semi-ignore while cross-stitching a Christmas stocking for my little cousin. I am much more watching, much less ignoring now. Kinda worried about the progress of this Christmas stocking, but I will keep…

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Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace

I remember when I first read Salman Rushdie. I checked Midnight’s Children out of the library along with a bunch of other books, and I thought that if every other book I had turned out to be lame, I would do my duty by literature and read Salman Rushdie who was bound to be boring but I was going to do my duty. By God. And all the other books I checked out turned out to be lame, so I read Midnight’s Children and hey! It turned out it was funny! Salman Rushdie is funny! I was disproportionately shocked and…

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Review: The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm

Have you heard anything bad about Janet Malcolm yet? If so, now would be a good time to tell me! The first flush of love from The Silent Woman has worn a little bit off, The Crime of Sheila McGough was not that good, and I haven’t had a chance to get another Janet Malcolm book out of the library. The Crime of Sheila McGough is about a lawyer who was indicted for, I don’t know, some sort of dishonest practices. She was lawyering for a small-time con man, the con man stole from the wrong guy, the guy got…

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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…

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Review: The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock

Okay. Here’s what it is. When a book is called The Book of Lies, I I wanted the narrator to be truly, truly unreliable. Unreliable as hell is what I wanted. I wanted her to bleed unreliability. I wanted to never feel sure what was going on, and at the end of the book, I wanted there to be a SHOCKING TWIST where the book told me, Hey, you thought you knew what was going on? Boy were you wrong (a la A Dark-Adapted Eye). That’s what I wanted. I had it in my head that’s what I was going…

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Speaking of good parents

(which is what I was doing in my post about Patrick Ness), a word about my Daddy. Many of y’all already know how great my Mumsy is, because she is often lurking around the blogosphere, and because I talk about how she recommends me books, and because she sometimes guest-posts here. And I go on and on about Legal, Indie, and Social Sisters. But I don’t seem to talk about my father very much, which is weird because he is the best father in the world. In fact — this may be controversial but it is true — I’m going…

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