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…
11 CommentsReading the End Posts
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…
26 Comments(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…
45 CommentsAt last, at last! I absolutely loved Sea of Poppies when I read it last summer, and I have been babbling about it a lot since then, especially when in company with Teresa, who loved it first and put me on to it. I have been longing and longing for the second book in the Ibis trilogy to come out for, like, ever. Sea of Poppies ended right when all the characters had finally started hanging out together, and I was so excited to read the new book where they would start out together and interact with each other all…
12 CommentsY’all may not know this about me, but I love the Supreme Court of the United States. I love it. I have only ever really talked about John Paul Stevens on this blog, and God knows I adore John Paul Stevens, but more generally, I am a massive, massive fan of the Supreme Court. When fall comes and Dahlia Lithwick starts posting her Supreme Court recaps, my heart is filled with the kind of joy that I normally only feel when someone writes a complimentary post about Oscar Wilde and his continued relevance to modern life. The Supreme Court is…
32 CommentsWhat I wanted: A corrective emotional experience to How Shakespeare Changed Everything, which I hated. Why I didn’t read Will in the World, which I own and still haven’t read, rather than going to the library to get this: Y’all, I don’t know. I felt like a how their reputation happened sort of a book. My satisfaction level: Moderate. To be fair I don’t think I’d have felt any different if I’d read Will in the World, and perhaps less satisfied because it wouldn’t have been the sort of book I was in the mood for, which, again, was a…
8 CommentsI posted a post too soon instead of scheduling it. Ignore my last post, if you have Google Reader! Ignore it! It’s not Ada Leverson’s birthday yet! (When I do this, I feel disproportionately embarrassed like it is a major social gaffe for which you will all (well, all the Google Reader users) judge me. Even though I know that you won’t.)
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