I will preface this by saying that I liked this book a lot. However, due to that habit I have of forming expectations when I read about things, it was also not at all what I thought it was going to be. Because I forgot about the whole second half of Nymeth’s review or something, but the only thing that stuck with me was a girl goes off to live with her cousins (there is really no phrase I find more appealing in a book synopsis than goes off to live with) and I had a vague sense that they…
4 CommentsReading the End Posts
This is more like it. I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go when I was in England. I don’t remember why – maybe it was that phase in my life where I was getting book recommendations from book prize lists. Book prize books are often not good books for me (see Darkmans). However, I really liked Never Let Me Go, and I really liked this one too. The beginning: The Remains of the Day (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is all about a butler called Stevens who has been in service for many years, and has gone on…
5 CommentsWell, hmph. Well, not really hmph. I sort of take back my hmph. It’s that expectations/reality gap again – I should just stop reading positive reviews of books. If only there were some way of deciding what books to read without forming any expectations at all. Wouldn’t that be nice? But there are just some things that cause my expectations to become high, such as – let me think – okay, such as stories about children who go away to live with relatives/at a boarding school/with a bunch of strangers, and they have adventures. Or stories with Catholic orphans. Or…
5 CommentsUpdate: Okay! I am sending books to mindy, Colleen, Kate, Darby, Anastasia, and Stacie. I’ve emailed y’all, but leave another comment if you didn’t get my email. I’ve heard some good things about John Bellairs, but when I tried one of his books once, I didn’t finish it because I wasn’t hugely in love with it. A little while ago, I found several of his books at the library sale for ten cents. So I got them. Why not? If it turns out I hate them, I thought, they were only ten cents. No big loss. Since then I have…
11 CommentsBlech. Everyone’s been reading Susan Hill lately, and her books all sounded so creepy and cool, but I couldn’t finish this. I stayed up late last night reading it, because I kept thinking I would read it until it got interesting and then I would go to sleep and have something to look forward to in the morning. What a stupid idea. I mean, that was always going to be a stupid idea, but it was particularly stupid in this case because the book never got interesting at all. Two-thirds of the way through, I figured out that I was…
1 CommentI’ve been meaning to read this book for ten thousand years. I saw it at Bongs & Noodles once, when I had a bunch of B&N gift card credit, and thought seriously about getting it, before ultimately deciding on something totally different. And then I got it out of the library before Christmas last year. I love the library. I don’t know how anyone functions without the lovely library. This book is just what you might imagine, a history of virginity, or really, cultural attitudes towards virginity. It is completely fascinating. Really. I’ve been staying up late the past two…
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