Ha, ha, you thought you had escaped from the Stuff to Worry About series. Silly readers. I worry about so many things that I had to self-edit so you wouldn’t be getting Stuff to Worry About posts all the time. There is a plague on starfish. You may read about it here. Basically, starfish are dying of this wasting disease where their arms fall off, and because I don’t want to be the only one having these nightmares, I am going to add that sometimes in the course of this disease their arms fall off and crawl away. Scientists are…
29 CommentsReading the End Posts
On today’s bonus edition of the Reading the End Bookcast, we play a game in which Randon and I each match up NFL teams to a list of writers provided by Whiskey Jenny. Whiskey Jenny awards points to the answer that most pleases her. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 15a Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much). If you’re wondering how…
2 CommentsI started keeping a new TBR spreadsheet a few months back, with different tabs for pleasure reading, research reading, and forthcoming books. Maybe some weekend when I’m bored, I’ll set it up so that I can track when I read/review one of the books on the list, and it’ll make automatic pie charts of my percentages of gender, nationality, and whether the American cover was better or the British one. (Currently all that stuff is on another spreadsheet.) (Yes, I like spreadsheets. Sue me.) Anyway, Marbles, by Ellen Forney (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the very first book…
9 CommentsWILKIE IN WINTER I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. A hundred thank-yous to the wonderful Estella Society for hosting this event. Today we shall discuss the First Epoch of The Woman in White, or as I like to call it, the much-more-successful-first-act-than-the-first-act-of-The-Moonstone. (It’s a long nickname, yes, but it makes some good points.) Of Wilkie Collins’s two most famous works, The Moonstone has a stronger finale, and The Woman in White a much much much stronger set-up. Where The Moonstone spends a lot of time on place-setting, The Woman in White has a short set-up where we meet Our Hero, Walter Hartright,…
29 CommentsI have seen Clueless … a few times. It’s not germane to know exactly how many, and also I’ve lost count. In my defense, Clueless is amazing. I’ve seen it so many times, in fact, that I can’t read Emma–even for a readalong where Emma Approved is the adaptation to discuss — without a thick overlay of Clueless: When Emma first starts spending time with Harriet, all I can think of is this: Occasionally I worry that I’m not addressing the novel on its own terms, but mostly I feel glad that Alicia Silverstone’s fundamental adorability and goodness makes it…
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Review: The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, Valerie Martin
Programming note: Because of my commitment to depicting the way I really read, this review is less focused than I might prefer. Sometimes reading the end is like that — you go to read the end and find out that you haven’t read enough of the beginning for the ending to make sense. The beginning: A husband and wife die at sea. Back at home in New England, their family grieves for them; amongst them is a woman called Sallie, who struggles to manage her spiritualism-obsessed sister Hannah, while also discovering her own love for her cousin Benjamin Briggs. The…
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