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Reading the End Posts

Review: The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe

Not to be confused with The End of Everything! But read roughly around the same time. I know. I was really slow in reviewing this. I am just bad at reviews this years, you guys. I need to institute a system to make myself be more systematic. Rachel (come visit soon, Rachel!) told me that she had to give me a book and for me to tell her what I thought about it, because she had loved it but it also made her really angry, and she wanted to know if my reaction would be the same. It was, except…

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A question about the Bechdel Test

So the Bechdel Test – invented by Alison Bechdel – critiques the dearth of primary female characters with any degree of interiority in teh moviez, and it consists of three criteria: The show/book/film whatever 1) has two female characters who 2) have a conversation about 3) something other than a man. Fewer films/shows than you’d think pass this test, including many that I love. Like, Firefly? Almost none (if any?) of the episodes pass the test. Kaylee and Inara are friends, but they almost always are talking about Simon or Inara’s clients. Zoe is terse and spends all her time…

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Review: The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson

I am late to the Marilyn Johnson party, y’all. I am not fashionably late. I am so late the servers are washing glasses and the other guests have long since departed for the after-party at the library books bar. By which I mean, y’all have probably all already read this and gone on to read This Book Is Overdue, and by now y’all are probably Marilyn Johnson’s agent for her next book about, I don’t know, the lives of book scouts or something. So, sorry. As my mother says, sometimes it be’s that way. The Dead Beat is about obituaries:…

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Review: The Sherlockian, Graham Moore

Harold is the youngest ever member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a secretive group of Sherlock Holmes devotees. At his first ever meeting, the preeminent Sherlockian in the world has come to present the lost diary of Conan Doyle, the holy grail of, you know, of Sherlock Holmes dudes. But when the body of the scholar is found strangled in his hotel room, Harold becomes obsessed with finding out the Truth. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago, Arthur Conan Doyle receives a letter bomb, apparently related to his decision to chuck his hero, Sherlock Holmes, off a waterfall. Trying to trace…

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Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

Oh this book. Oh it hurt my heart. All the time I was reading it and thinking how it reminded me of an illustrated, more grown-up version of There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, which I read when I was a little kid. I still tear up slightly when I read There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom. Don’t judge. Louis Sachar can’t tug on my heartstrings? Junior lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation, where he regularly gets beaten up because he is a weird kid. He has a stutter and a large head and brain damage from being…

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The Peacock Spring, Rumer Godden

As I write this review, I am in a state of near-perfect happiness. I will tell you why. I am sitting in an Oscar Wilde-themed cafe in the West Village, drinking coffee from a teacup and eating a scone with clotted cream and raspberry jam. There is a cafe in the West Village called Bosie (I know, right? What a weird thing to name a cafe!), and it has in the back a framed picture of Oscar Wilde (to recapitulate, I am not making this up), and it has these really lovely scones with jam. I am well aware that…

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BBAW: Community!

Okay, so. I didn’t write the Monday BBAW community post where I would say, this blogger is the best! And this blogger is also the best! And so on, and so forth! I didn’t do that because the time slot I had intended to devote to doing that on Sunday, I instead spent suddenly weirdly caring a lot a lot about the Jets/Cowboys game and coming very close to bursting into tears when the Jets won. I don’t care about the Jets. It was the 9/11 anniversary and they kept showing footage of the Tribute in Light, and that was…

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Things that are nice about this week

1. Yesterday morning I killed the m.f. mosquito that kept me from comfortable sleep the last, like, three nights. I wanted to scream war chants of triumph. I hate that mosquito. It was insatiable. I am waiting two more weeks and then I am taking my window unit out of my window and having the super install a screen. Otherwise I know that more mosquitoes will come. It’s been rainy all week. These goddamn mosquitoes. 2. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Zibilee has told me the title of a book that is the exact book I want to read right now. Wonderful…

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The Shadow of the Moon, M. M. Kaye

The review in a moment. But first, thank you to whatever lovely person nominated me for Best Eclectic Book Blog for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. Whoever you are, you are so very sweet and kind. You can’t see me, but I am making a heart shape with my forefingers and thumbs, to indicate that I Appreciate you too. On Labor Day weekend, I went to stay with my relatives. Legal Sister came too. It was so pleasant. I left on Friday afternoon and spent the weekend lying around reading The Shadow of the Moon (in the hammock when sunny, on…

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The End of Everything, Megan Abbott

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book and being sure throughout most of the book that you know what’s going on, and then you get to the end and you realize that you actually have no idea if you really know what the author is talking about? That was my experience with The End of Everything. As the denouement unfolded, I stopped saying “Yup, yup, yup, yup,” to imaginary Megan Abbott in my head and instead said, “Wait, what were you talking about?” The End of Everything is about a thirteen-year-old girl called Lizzie whose best friend…

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