Skip to content

Reading the End Posts

Review: Arcadia, Tom Stoppard

There is a particular sort of novel of which I always profess to be passionately fond: the sort with one plotline in the olden days with people doing their olden-day thing, and one in the present with eager scholars researching the very olden-day events in the other plotline.  (Is there a word for this sort of book?  Can there be one?)  If you have ever reviewed a book like this on your blog, I have probably commented to say something like, “Love this sort of book!  Adore!  Worship!  Cannot imagine my life without!” and added it to my reading list…

29 Comments

Stomping around my bedroom late at night

I do not appreciate the suggestion that Oscar Wilde’s cleverness consisted in paradoxical epigram.  I will accept gracious tributes to Wilde’s way with epigrams, like Dorothy Parker’s: If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit. We all assume that Oscar said it. Thank you, Dorothy Parker.  You have lovely qualities and could bang out epigrams with the best of them. I will not, however, sit idly by in the face of any slighting reference to Oscar Wilde that implies that he was not as witty and charming as he is…

22 Comments

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Susan Jane Gilman

The word “grandiose”, in my family, is a loaded word.  When one of us uses the word “grandiose” to describe someone, we understand that we actually mean “might possibly benefit from medication; updates as warranted”.  I bring that up because if I had been traveling in Communist China with a girl I didn’t know very well, and she had started talking about the project she was working on that was going to be important to national security, I’d have called home and said, “Claire is waxing grandiose,” and my parents would have said, “You get her on a plane and…

41 Comments

Fellowship, Finished

I am so late writing this post!  But the Lord of the Rings Readalong is continuing, and I am combining the end-of-Fellowship questions from Clare and the start-of-Towers questions from Teresa all in one post.  I can do that. Since we’re dealing with the first third of a novel, instead of the first novel in a series, do you find anything different? The pacing would be sort of whack if this were the first novel in the series.  Book 1 of Fellowship spends all this time being hobbits and getting the hobbits out of the Shire, and then in Book…

14 Comments

Best. Day. Ever.

But first, can I say?  The puppy is monster-sized now.  Every time I stop by my parents’ house, Jasmine M. Puppy has gotten huger.  At the start of February I already thought she was massive, if fluffy: Monstrous, right?  Can’t possibly get any bigger than that?  Already the world’s largest ever puppy?  Aha, but this is before she got groomed.  I talked to my mother the day after Jasmine got groomed, and I asked her how the puppy looked, and she said tragically, “They groomed her like a poodle!”  (Which is what she is.)  And then my mother said, continuing…

49 Comments

Review: White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

In White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi has done the thing I was afraid she wasn’t going to manage, which is to become EVEN BETTER YET in her third book than she was in her second.  She can’t keep this up much longer, right?  I mean she has to plateau at some point, right?  Helen Oyeyemi!  What will you do to stagger and amaze us next? White is for Witching is about a set of twins, Eliot and Miranda, who live in a haunted house.  Miranda has pica, and the house hates foreigners.  As the book goes on, we come…

32 Comments

Review: Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork

I love it that this author’s name is Francisco X. Stork.  There is nothing about that name that I do not love.  I would read more of this guy’s books based solely on the fact that his name is Francisco X. Stork.  I wish my name were Stork, except Jenny Stork is not nearly as amazing as Francisco X. Stork.  So never mind, I guess. Marcelo Sandoval has an autism spectrum mental issue that doctors have been unable to identify.  Since first grade he has attended a special education school, but when he is seventeen his father tells him that…

46 Comments

Anthropomorphizing (I can’t help it)

I noticed the other day that the ads on my Facebook sidebar had little X icons to let you close them.  I thought, Hey, great, I will get rid of this Facebook Mobile ad.  Facebook Mobile is of no use to me as I do not have that functionality on my little crappy phone.  But when I clicked the X to get rid of the ad, it popped up a little notification that said, “Why don’t you like this ad?  Choose reason,” and all the reasons were hurtful.  They were all “Offensive” or “Uninteresting” or “Irrelevant”, and I kept picturing…

30 Comments

The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox

I am being awesome at the Graphic Novels Challenge but completely falling down on the other ones.  Women Unbound, nothing since The Group though in fact I suppose I could have used The Opposite House.  Or, hey, Committed!  Actually, Committed totally is one.  I’m going back and editing that post and using Committed for the Women Unbound Challenge.  Time Traveling, couldn’t manage to get anywhere with the Stephen Fry.  And Horns and Halos?  UTTERLY have not read anything for it.  I started and stopped Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, and that is it. Until now! The Vintner’s Luck is about a…

29 Comments

Review: Swallow Me Whole, Nate Powell

Y’all, at some point, I’m going to do a mental illness reading challenge.  Is there already one?  I’m going to do one if there isn’t already one.  I love mental illness (I mean I do not love it.  It is awful and ruins people’s lives.  I just find it very interesting).  As soon as I think of a clever name and invent an adorable button, I will be all over this, and Swallow Me Whole is one of the books you can read for it.  PREPARE YOURSELVES. I read Swallow Me Whole for the Graphic Novels Challenge! Swallow Me Whole…

29 Comments