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Reading the End Posts

Review: Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

Every time I have checked out a Jeeves book from the library, it has been because I went looking for something in the W section and failed to find it.  In this case, the library claimed they had several Jeanette Winterson books in, when what they meant was that they had absolutely no Jeanette Winterson books in at all.  In particular they did not have Sexing the Cherry, which is the one I was after.  I drifted gloomily down the shelves and checked out two Jeeves books instead. I do not advise this as a strategy.  It invites comparisons, and…

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Review: Broken Glass Park, Alina Bronsky (translated by Tim Mohr)

FTC darling, I am constantly getting you mixed up with the FCC.  I am always saying, Grrr, that FTC, cranky censorship snarl can’t even say swear words on the television grumble grumble grumble, and then remembering twenty minutes later that I’ve been ranting about the wrong acronym.   Sorry, FTC!  It was unkind of me to call you an ugly poophead and a fascist bastard, even if it was just to my sister!  Also, I thought you’d want to know that I received Broken Glass Park for review from the lovely people at Regal Literary Agency. What I liked about Broken…

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Reviews: Yes Means Yes & Female Chauvinist Pigs

At last!  It’s March and I’ve finally managed to read another of the books from my list for the Women Unbound Challenge!  I’m having to make substitutions to the list because my library does not have Bluestockings (which, oh, I really wanted! but never mind, life is pain), and although it claims to have Foreign Correspondence, it has not been shelved where they claim that it is shelved (in Biography). Yes Means Yes, ed. Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman The subtitle of this collection is Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  It’s…

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Review: The Unlikely Disciple, Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose, son of liberal Quakers, decided to leave Brown University and spend a semester at Jerry Falwell’s “Bible Boot Camp”, Liberty University.  There he attended classes on biblical history and evangelism, participated in a mission trip to Daytona Beach during spring break, and joined a support group for chronic masturbators.  When he announced his intention to spend a semester at Liberty, his family and friends expected him to find a group of intolerant arch-conservatives marching in lockstep, but the reality (of course) was far more complicated. I could not put this book down.  I must read thousands of books…

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King of Shadows, Susan Cooper

I read this for the Time Travel Challenge.  Yeah, I’m not adhering to my list.  TOO BAD.  I’m making King of Shadows part of a time travel mini-challenge that I call the Books I Like Because They Contain Time Travel and in Spite of Having Been Written by Authors I Do Not Like as Much as My Big Sister Does Challenge.  I shall include Time Cat in this mini-challenge too, because I can do that. Nat Field, a twelve-year-old with a tragedy in his background, comes to London as part of a company of boys to perform at the newly…

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Review: The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

Metafiction.  That’s another challenge I should invent, if there isn’t one already, a metafiction challenge.  I always expect to love metafiction passionately, and when it lets me down, I feel hurt and betrayed.  Like the book of The Princess Bride.  Why did you be so lame, book of The Princess Bride?  Atonement.  Wicked after they left school, but particularly after, um, a certain event?  That I don’t want to say because some of you maybe haven’t read the book yet?  Slaughterhouse Five.  Giles Goat-Boy. And then sometimes it is great, like The Unwritten, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Ella…

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My sister’s coming home!

Not the sister in New Orleans (she is already home), and not the sister who sometimes comments on this blog to offer me books and make lawyer-like objections to my turns-of-phrase (she is busy learning things in New England), but the littlest sister, the one who is studying abroad in Old England.  She’s coming home! and I am glad that she is, because I have just about reached the end of my tolerance for watching movies without her. When Social Sister and I are together, we have this tendency to say the same things over and over, with increasing excitement…

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Review: Secret Keeper, Mitali Perkins

For some reason I can’t seem to finish any books these days.  There are a number of factors involved.  I have a lot of good books right now.  I am rereading Fables as well as several volumes of L.M. Montgomery’s generally-predictable-but-sweet-nevertheless short stories.  I’m also reading The Two Towers, The Bell, Yes Means Yes, and more of Tom Stoppard’s plays.  I have fallen back in love with a still-untitled (I’m crap at titles) story I’ve been working on for ages, so I’m working on rewriting that.  Having scheduled a Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Marathon with my sister and…

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Bon temps, after all

This weekend I drove down to New Orleans to visit my sister.  I do not like driving to unfamiliar places, and driving in New Orleans, as you will know if you have been there, is not set up in such a way as to prevent a bewildered girl from getting lost.  For that reason I have not managed to pay a solo visit to my sister since she moved to New Orleans two years ago (that reason and also the cats she has, which I am allergic to, but mostly I am just a bad person).  We thought we would…

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Review: The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer

Having read, now, two of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances (the other being The Reluctant Widow), and having begun making plans to dole them out to myself when I am having difficult days, I have been trying to decide what I like about them, and to remember why I refused to read them for so long.  The facts as I knew them were that a) my mum, who gave me half of my favorite books, liked her; and that b) Stephen Fry liked her; and that c) Sorcery and Cecelia, which I love, was essentially Georgette Heyer with magic.  Why would…

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