(Finally getting around to reading some of the books I got at the book fair in early March. Stupid library, distracting me.) Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine – at one point she reads about it and discovers it has a 5% survival rate. After ages and ages having this sorted out, she is left with part of her jaw missing. Later on she receives numerous grafts to sort this out, and these work for a while and then keep getting reabsorbed. (I believe that’s how it worked – I’m fuzzy on medical…
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I got this book out of the library because I put Martin Millar’s name into the Literature-Map website, and Caitlin Kiernan’s name was close to his. This is one of those things that I should know straight away isn’t going to work out for me: every time I do this, I find that the closest authors to the name I’ve entered are people I either haven’t heard of or don’t like, whereas the names of authors I do like are farther out to the perimeter. Douglas Coupland, Neil Gaiman, T.S. Eliot, and Alexandre Dumas are all well out at the…
Leave a CommentDon’t you love it when you re-encounter a book you’d completely forgotten about? I found Well Wished at the book fair, and as soon as I opened it I felt like I had been flashed straight back to second grade. I read Well Wished for the first time in the library of my elementary school, one afternoon when I was stuck there for what felt like forever. I don’t remember why I felt stuck – I like the library – or why I was there at all after school hours, but I remember this book. Well Wished is about a…
4 CommentsI started reading this in Bongs & Noodles one time, a while ago, and I got bored. I am more easily bored when I’m reading at Bongs & Noodles than I am in real life – maybe because Bongs & Noodles is all full of loads of brilliant books, and my time there is finite. Anyway, then I read about it over at Superfastreader’s blog, and it sounded so good I decided to reconsider. As often happens, I was very pleased that I did. The Meaning of Night is all about a Victorian gentleman called Edward Glyver who conceives a…
3 CommentsThe library doesn’t know I have this book. They should do – I didn’t sneak out with it or anything – but somehow it’s not on my list of checked-out books. As such, I haven’t felt any sense of urgency about reading it, so it’s been sitting patiently on the floor of my bedroom for quite some time now, waiting for me to get to it. And I thought today was a good day for it – I read it on the drive to and from my uncle and aunt’s house today for my first! crawfish boil! of the season!…
2 CommentsI picked this up at the library a little while ago, and realized when I got it home that I had read about it here before checking it out and completely forgotten. Weird. You wouldn’t think I’d be able to manage being uninterested in a memoir about someone whose father was a faith healer. But I just never got interested in this. For someone with such a colorful life, this guy has written a book that was surprisingly bland (yeah, I mixed that metaphor. Got a problem?). Even before I began to suspect that Mr. Smith genuinely believes in his…
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