If you are extremely attentive in a way that I am not, you may have noticed that I haven’t yet done a post on the second half of Doctor Zhivago. I finished the first half a few days ahead of schedule, and as a reward I let myself read some fun fiction, and one thing led to another and by the time the end of November rolled around I just hadn’t picked up Doctor Zhivago again. To compensate for being a bad readalong participant, and a bad reader who cannot appreciate classics of Russian literature, I checked out Elif Batuman’s…
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I lost my gloves on the subway the day before yesterday. They were beautiful gloves that I got for Christmas in 2005. I had told my then-boyfriend that what I wanted for Christmas more than anything in the world was beautiful black leather gloves exactly like my friend Nezabeth’s, and he got me those exact gloves. I have had them for years, and I am desperately attached to them. They are so soft and warm, and five years on from when I got them, they were just like new. I was on the B train, which I have only taken…
55 CommentsHave y’all ever seen Wonderfalls? If you haven’t, you really should. It’s basically Dead Like Me with a better premise, a better ensemble cast (absolutely no disrespect meant to Mandy Patinkin, whom I adore — it’s the dynamics between the characters that are better, really), and a stronger sense of what kind of a show it is. Where Dead Like Me gets a bit too grim, and Pushing Daisies can be a little too sweet, Wonderfalls finds the perfect balance. Naturally it’s the one of the three that ran for the shortest time. Anyway, there is this scene in Wonderfalls…
54 CommentsHave you heard of this book? It is as long as the prime meridian. I am not even lying. It follows several families of (mostly) forward-thinking artists and businesspeople from the late 1890s to the early part of the First World War. It is eight trillion pages of thick, lush prose, and if a book blogger found, as she drew closer to the end, that she simply could not bear to wade through the war poetry of a character she never felt lived up to his full potential of interestingness, well, you can understand how that would happen. I sound…
62 CommentsI checked out The Sirens of Baghdad to read it, flipped to the back cover, and saw that Yasmina Khadra is really a dude called Mohammed Moulessehoul. And I was like, Really, dude? Really? You have to write as a girl? and I made fun of him in my mind all day before starting to read his book. Because women actually legitimately have to pretend to be dudes to get their books to sell sometimes! From Charlotte Bronte to Karen Blixen to, hell, even J. K. Rowling a bit! I was paying attention to the serious issues that Khadra was…
20 CommentsWhat was I reading recentlyish that talked about the Dark Ages being defined by the lack of Homer and Ovid? Was it The Secret History? Or The Fall of Rome maybe? Probably it was Tom Stoppard, Arcadia or The Invention of Love. It sounds like the kind of thing Tom Stoppard would say. Anyway, whatever character it was, they said something about how the Dark Ages were Dark because we didn’t have the classics around, in all their universal brilliance, to explain us to ourselves. When the West got them back again (thanks, Arabia!), it was like being reborn, a…
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