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Reading the End Posts

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.…

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Review: You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

Published 14 May 2011 by Gin Jenny

Further study may confirm or deny this, but I suspect that short story collections do not make for good book club discussions. Or maybe my nonwork brunch book club is just bad at keeping on topic. We completely forgot to brainstorm a name for ourselves, and we spent about twenty (nonconsecutive) minutes talking about the book, and the remainder of the time chattering about shoes. You Know When the Men Are Gone is a loosely connected group of short stories about the army: life on an army base, or life in a war zone, or how to handle a homecoming.…

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Review: Which Brings Me to You, Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott

Published 12 May 2011 by Gin Jenny

I am a sucker for an epistolary novel. I will read anything epistolary, even something so patently ridiculous as Clarissa. (Yes, I’ve read Clarissa. Yes, it was really silly. I have recently learned there was a BBC adaptation of it with Sean Bean and since I have for Sean Bean feelings that teeter on the boundary between man-crush and proper real crush, I will be checking that out from the library ASAP.) When Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkeysee blog mentioned Which Brings Me to You on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (the only podcast I listen to because it…

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