Eva wants to know how we are all faring with The Hobbit, and I must say I am enjoying it a moderate amount, which is a moderate amount more than I was expecting to enjoy it. At the start of chapter 9, these are my thoughts: 1. When I started out, my reaction was exactly the same as it was when I was eight: I was so indignant on Bilbo’s behalf! How dare those nasty dwarves come in, and mess up his nice house, and eat all his food, and then be all snotty and dismissive of him when he…
20 CommentsReading the End Posts
Verdict: Upsetting. I’d never heard of The Group before Claire of Paperback Reader posted about it on her blog earlier this year, but I was immediately intrigued by her description of it (and not just because the phrase seminal feminist text is delightfully absurd). The Group follows a group of eight 1933 Vassar graduates, with each chapter focusing on one of the girls and a major event in her life: Dottie’s first experience of sex, Priss attempting to breast-feed her first son, Libby’s struggles with her career in literature, Polly’s involvement with a married man. It’s very frank and upfront…
39 CommentsThe Lord of the Rings Readalong started this month! Hosted by Eva, Maree, Teresa, and Clare, this readalong is starting with reading The Hobbit this month, and we will all read one of the Lord of the Rings books each month subsequently. Until we run out at the end of April, and then there will be a great mourning across the blogosphere until everyone agrees to read, I don’t know, The Silmarillion. It is not a challenge. I have absolutely put my foot down and shan’t join any more challenges than the ones I already have, and this Lord of…
26 CommentsWatching the English, Kate Fox I have a confession to make, y’all. I am a sucker for pop psychology, and also pop sociology and yes, pop anthropology. It’s all, you know, it’s all readable, and there are interview excerpts, and people talk about what they think and why they do the things they do. How could anyone not love that? I love that so much! I know that Kate Fox’s Watching the English is observational and subjective and thus Not Proper Science, and maybe it was a tiny smidge repetitive…and yet I do not care. Because it got me all…
43 CommentsJasmine M. Puppy is getting bigger and bigger. Soon I will have to call her Jasmine M. Dog. Every time I see her, she seems to have gotten bigger. Her nose is longer. It is harder to support all of her feet when I scoop her up, and indeed I am scooping her up less and less, as my parents are trying to train her to be a standard-poodle-sized dog rather than a lap dog. Here she is at seven weeks, with her toy koala bear: And here is a picture of her with her koala toy from eleven weeks…
22 CommentsI should know better. I very foolishly checked Slaughterhouse Five out of the library and brought it to read on our camping trip even though I suspected I wasn’t going to like it and I knew the person who recommended it to me was going to be on our camping trip wanting me to like it. I read books when I’m given them, and when I don’t like them, I’m likely to say “I liked [specific thing],” or “It’s very well-written!”, rather than lying straight out with something like “Yes! I liked it!”, and I had planned exactly what I…
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