This is not so much a review, as a big political thing involving this book and the author of the last one I read. I decided to make it a separate post from the one about Iran: A People Interrupted. Mainly because otherwise the post would have been too disjointed; and because the stuff I want to write about right now is really about Reading Lolita in Tehran. See, Hamid Dabashi really does not like Azar Nafisi. Y’all, he really doesn’t like her – not in a box, not with a fox, not in a house, not with a mouse. …
8 CommentsTag: memoirs
I don’t know what I can really say about Persepolis that hasn’t been said already. What I love about the first volume of Persepolis is that it’s always about how Marjane interprets the events around her, much more than it is about the events themselves. As she and her family live through the Islamic Revolution, watching its agenda shift and their country change around them, little Marjane acts on what she thinks she understands. There’s a lovely bit where she insists on spending all her time with an uncle who’s a political dissident. Although she is initially interested in him…
3 CommentsThis was a gift that I bought for someone’s birthday, and I read it before I gave it to my friend. I’m sorry! In my defense, I read it incredibly carefully. I mean just incredibly carefully, you have no idea, I practically had to poke my nose inside the book, because I was opening the covers only the littlest possible bit. Whatever, there is no excuse for me. This is fine when I do it with my friend tim, or my Indie Sister, or even my mother, because I know they are all doing the same thing with (at least…
5 Comments(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…
Leave a CommentI 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…
Leave a CommentAccidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made, is a memoir about Mary Pols getting pregnant completely accidentally at the age of 39, from what was meant to be a one-night stand. I got it off the library display case for New Nonfiction yesterday, and read it that evening. Because I like memoirs. Well, I like memoirs but. I like memoirs, but books like this bring up all my serious, grave concerns about memoirs. On the one hand, I want them to be honest – I feel so let down when…
Leave a CommentI read about this on Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s “Writer’s Table” – authors pick out books that are supposed to have “shaped their writing”, and they write little reviews in a few words. I can’t remember why I was looking at Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s Writer’s Table – although Nick Hornby is absolutely inextricably linked in my mind to the month I spent in London in 2005. There was a heat stroke in the second week of July, and the dorm where we were staying didn’t have air conditioning of course, and my room was on the third (American fourth) floor, so…
4 CommentsI put a hold on this book in November, after reading about it here, and I almost canceled it the day before it actually came in, because I thought surely the book was lost and would never be returned, and I was just out of luck as far as reading this book went. Which I thought was too bad because it sounded interesting, and I was curious to know what I missed out on when I dropped out of the library science master’s program. This book is amusing and entertaining, which is what it’s intended to be. The stories he…
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