Skip to content

Reading the End Posts

Review: One Day, David Nicholls

Published 29 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

Here’s what’s happening, y’all. My sister has been in town, and I am moving house. I have been doing lots of cool, fun stuff with my sister. We went to see the coolest ever exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design the other day, this thing about small worlds, which was so unbelievably beautiful. And we went a-picnicking on Governors Island  on Sunday, wearing flapper dresses. Then also I am moving house. I’ve finally found a new apartment (yay!) in an area that looks like I’m going to like a lot, with roommates who seem terribly nice, and a…

Continue readingReview: One Day, David Nicholls
57 Comments

Review: The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, Jeanne Birdsall

Published 26 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

Oh, the Penderwicks. Jeanne Birdsall has said that she wrote the sort of book she liked to read when she was a girl, by which I must assume that Jeanne Birdsall and I had vastly similar reading tastes. When I read one of the now three books in the Penderwicks series, it makes me feel like I am about ten years old and back in southern Maine, curled up reading on the attic bed in the little cottage we rented every summer. This, presumably, is exactly what Jeanne Birdsall intended. The Penderwicks books are about four sisters (I am one…

Continue readingReview: The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, Jeanne Birdsall
32 Comments

Review: Persian Fire, Tom Holland (or, awesome stories)

Published 12 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

May I tell you a story about Athens? Please be aware that you can’t answer “no” to this question, because there is no chance at all of my not telling you this story about Athens. Once upon a time, there was an Athenian king called Pisistratus. Pisistratus was a pretty good king, but like many pretty good kings he had two not-so-goodish sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, who took charge of Athens after Pisistratus died. Hipparchus died (that’s a whole other story), and Hippias was an awful king, so this fellow Cleisthenes went trotting round to Sparta and asked them please…

Continue readingReview: Persian Fire, Tom Holland (or, awesome stories)
37 Comments

Review: Under the Harrow, Mark Dunn

Published 10 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

If I may steal a locution from the Fug Girls: MarkDunnily played, Mark Dunn. Mark Dunn, as some of you may recall, is the author of Ella Minnow Pea, a delightfully clever satire that avoided the many pitfalls of a comic novel and utterly charmed me in the process. (Short version: It’s an epistolary novel in which letters of the alphabet gradually become verboten, so that the book in its later stages must do without half the alphabet.) Under the Harrow, Dunn’s most recent novel, overcomes its slightly cliched story using sheer charm and thoroughness of invention. The valley of…

Continue readingReview: Under the Harrow, Mark Dunn
13 Comments

Review: Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie

Published 8 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

My lovely Legal Sister bought me Shalimar the Clown at a book sale last year and gave it to me when she GRADUATED SISTER GRADUATED WOOOO YAY FOR SISTERS. Legal Sister reports that the family has a policy whereby we all give each other books we got at book sales and do not have to pay each other back. I am not sure this is a real policy, but I’m delighted to acknowledge it as if it were. Shalimar the Clown is one of the two fiction books by Salman Rushdie I had yet to read (not counting Grimus and…

Continue readingReview: Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
37 Comments

Sleep No More (theater production)

Published 6 Jun 2011 by Gin Jenny

I show my ticket, a blue six of spades, and I am dropped off on the top floor. (I think it’s the top floor. I keep losing track.) The audience members all wear white masks and are bound to silence. There is definitely a forest on this floor, and a couple on the dance floor dancing a polka. Aha! They must be the Macbeths! They stop dancing and embrace like bears, then take off in opposite directions. I have read that it’s best to follow one actor for as long as possible, so I go chasing after Lady Macbeth. She…

Continue readingSleep No More (theater production)
31 Comments

Review: All Clear, Connie Willis

Published 25 May 2011 by Gin Jenny

Both these things are true: I liked and felt satisfied with All Clear, the second of two books about time-traveling Oxford historians who get stuck in Britain in World War II; and, it is perfectly possible I will never read another book by Connis Willis. Blackout left us on a cliffhanger. Eileen, Polly, and Mike, three Oxford historians from the future, are trapped in London in World War II. Their drops did not open to return them to Oxford, and their Oxford retrieval teams never showed up. They have begun to fear that they have accidentally changed history, that England…

Continue readingReview: All Clear, Connie Willis
36 Comments

The Good Wife

Published 19 May 2011 by Gin Jenny

This has gone on long enough, this business where I haven’t written an entire post about The Good Wife and how marvelous it is. Readers, I need a moment of your time. (Good Wife reference! Get it? Anyone? Get it? Legal Sister?) If you are like Past Jenny, you have heard of The Good Wife and its acclaimedness, but you haven’t watched it because you do not like Chris Noth and although you like Alan Cumming just fine and have nothing against Julianna Margulies, that is not enough to induce you to watch a show that looks like it will…

Continue readingThe Good Wife
34 Comments

Turned out not to be a review: The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett

Published 18 May 2011 by Gin Jenny

Disclaimer: I started this review with goodish intentions, and it went all pear-shaped as I went on with it. I am so sorry. I nearly didn’t post it, but then I thought, Well, what if someone who reads this blog loves W.H. Auden and lives in Washington DC, and without this blog post they wouldn’t know to go see The Habit of Art when it’s on at the Studio Theatre in the fall of the year? So I’m posting it anyway. I am so, so sorry. One point I’ve beaten to death on this blog is that comparisons are odious.…

Continue readingTurned out not to be a review: The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett
21 Comments