I am miles behind on reviews, miles. As I write this review on 3 May, I have five other books I’ve yet to review. I keep telling myself that I’ve been a bad blogger because I haven’t had any time to read, but this is demonstrably untrue. I’ve been reading like mad and just not getting time to write the reviews. I read The Night Villa weeks ago, and in fact wrote a review of it, but WordPress glitched and I lost the review. And then I was too discouraged to write it over again. Let that be my excuse.…
22 CommentsReading the End Posts
I have now read two of Brian Friel’s plays (this one on the recommendation of my theater-savvy coworker) and I have determined that I am strongly in favor of him. Ordinarily I do not seek out the Lit’rature of Ireland, ancestral home though it is.1 Because the Lit’rature of Ireland seems terribly depressing, and even when it is Breakfast on Pluto and produced both that darling little film with Cillian Murphy and the excellent line about “his disagreeing face, disagreeing because it is as if he is saying ‘you can say this is happening but I don’t agree with you’”…
19 CommentsI meant to sneak this post in under the wire for National Poetry Month, but April came to a rapid and surprising end before I was able to. Never mind. The Anthologist is a book for all seasons. The Anthologist follows the slightly scattered thoughts of poet Paul Chowder about poetry and life as he struggles to produce an introduction to an anthology of poetry he’s editing. Historically I have not been a fan of books with thin plots, or books about alienated writers who have scared off their significant others by being impossible and now need to mope about…
22 CommentsThis marks the first time I have ever read Wuthering Heights without needing it to be Jane Eyre. And I hope Wuthering Heights appreciates that I made sacrifices in order to read it with eyes and mind uncontaminated by my frantic, abiding, decades-long love of Jane Eyre. That Mia Wasikowska movie came out and I went to see it and afterwards I really, really wanted to read Jane Eyre, and it just so happens I have a beautiful copy of Jane Eyre with gorgeous woodcut illustrations, which Legal Sister got for me and then wiped down every page with a…
59 CommentsIt is never fair to finish up a book you liked a lot/loved (in this case, The Secret History — despite my best intentions of early bed, I stayed up past until midnight to finish it this past rereading time), and turn straight away to a book you haven’t read before that sounds vaguely similar. You’re going to compare them, and even though your rational mind knows that they are not in competition, one of them is going to lose out. However, there were a few things working to shield The White Devil from the inevitable failure when compared to…
17 CommentsYou know Chandler from Friends? You know how in Friends, somebody would say something stupid, and Matthew Perry would do that thing where he would fling his whole body into one large, frantic gesture of utter incredulity? That is how I felt all the way through How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Exactly like that. I kept flinging the book across the room (really satisfying, by the way! A nice thing about ARCs is you can dog ear pages and throw them across the room or even rip out pages if you want, and it doesn’t matter because they belong to you,…
31 CommentsMiscellanea: Colum McCann and Colm Toibin are the same person in my head. I now feel pleased with myself for finally reading something by Colm Toibin. Also, I find it impossible not to write Colum McCann’s name as Column. Why I read the end: I realized halfway through the book that nothing in it had interested me enough to make me read the end. I still didn’t care enough to read the end, but I did because I didn’t want to be untrue to my byline. Also because I felt like as a new New Yorker, I should love a…
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