Oh I just love Hilary McKay. She has written these Casson books, which are among the most endearing books I have ever read. I organize my bookshelves (more or less) by how much I couldn’t do without the books, with the books on the right being the absolutely most essential ones, and then getting less and less essential moving to the left. And the Casson books, despite being a recent discovery, are on the far right of my children’s books section, along with the likes of The Ordinary Princess and Peter Pan and Indian Captive, which I read when I…
19 CommentsReading the End Posts
I recently read Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit, and found it unsatisfyingly lacking in good stories; I have had the opposite problem with Donna Freitas‘s Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Like Regnerus, Freitas is interested in exploring the intersection of religion/spirituality and sex in America’s youth, though she focuses on college students where Regnerus’s book was more interested in teenagers. She conducted interviews with students at different types of universities – Catholic ones, evangelical ones, regular public ones – about their spiritual and sexual lives and those of their community. Many good…
4 CommentsMargaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is feminist dystopian satire. It was sort of a box-tick read, but it was very good, and well-written, and I’m glad I read it and I never ever want to read it again. In slightly-future America, now a fascist misogynist theocracy called Gilead, Offred (but June, really) is a Handmaid. This means that she has viable ovaries, and is responsible for producing babies. Once a month she has sex with the Commander to whom she belongs, and her life is sharply circumscribed – she can’t read, can’t walk in public by herself, can’t talk to…
13 CommentsIn Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi writes about tar musician Nasser Ali, a great-uncle of hers who decides to die after his wife destroys his tar in a heated argument. He tries and tries to find another tar that will be the equal of the one that was destroyed, but even the best of tars will not make the music he imagines. He lies down on his bed and stays there for eight days, upon which he dies. Chicken with Plums follows him through those eight days, through visits and memories and dreams and hallucinations. The good: Marjane Satrapi charms…
4 CommentsI love a memoir, y’all, and you know what I love more than a memoir? A graphic novel memoir. Delicious. My library has a new section on their ever-growing graphic novels shelf, which is Biography. When I went in yesterday (collecting films for my poor sick little sister and lots of excellent books for me), I took three of the five books from the new wee little section. Including Fun Home – which I remember the library not having last time I checked, and I was well cross about it. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel‘s memoir about her father, a…
11 CommentsA book I acquired in spite of my firm and as-yet-unbroken book-buying ban. My lovely grandmother (my mum’s mum) sent it to me, all shiny and beautiful and hardback, along with an equally shiny and beautiful and hardback book about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots not liking each other (I am excited about this as it has been quite some time since I read anything about the Tudors). My grandmother loves to read. She inherited booklust from her father, my great-grandfather, who loved Rafael Sabatini and who gave a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to my grandmother…
5 CommentsI have wanted to read this play ever since I saw the title. This review brought to you by Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, where I first read about this play with its very excellent title, and by the Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road, to which very many props for their mad selection of drama. The Lady’s Not for Burning is a modern (1948) play set in the fifteenth century, and it is brilliant with its words but limited in its action, which all takes place in one room in the house of the city mayor. Thomas Mendip, a disillusioned ex-soldier,…
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