Now this would have been a good read for A More Diverse Universe, if I had but read it in time. I’m going to cunningly add a link to this post to the More Diverse Universe links page, and by the time Aarti notices it will be too late to do anything about my illicit post-linking. Mwahahahaha, I am the most cunning blogger in all the land. Long Division is about a boy named City (short for Citoyen) in 2013 who checks out a book called Long Division about a boy named City in 1985 who time-travels forward to 2013 to…
18 CommentsTag: metafiction
Review: Wit’s End, Karen Joy Fowler
Published 20 Jan 2014
by
Gin Jenny
The beginning: A woman called Rima, the last surviving member of her family, comes to live with her godmother, a famous mystery writer, in Santa Cruz. Addison was estranged from Rima’s father years ago, for reasons Rima has never known, and Rima has come to Santa Cruz partly to find out whether there was anything more than friendship between her father and her godmother. While living at Addison’s mansion (called Wit’s End), Rima becomes fascinated by Addison’s fans, whose online presence has given Addison’s fictional detective a life of his own. Damn, Wit’s End (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository)…
13 CommentsReview: The Nobodies Album, Carolyn Parkhurst
Published 20 Mar 2012
by
Gin Jenny
Author Octavia Frost has come up with the idea of rewriting the endings to each of her previous seven novels, and to put all the revised endings together as a brand new book, called The Nobodies Album. As she is traveling to deliver the manuscript to her agent, she sees a news item saying that her estranged son, Milo, has been arrested for murdering his girlfriend Bettina. Octavia and Milo (who is a rock star) have not spoken in four years, for reasons that are not immediately made clear; but when she sees that her son is in trouble, she…
14 CommentsThe Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon; trans. Lucia Graves
Published 21 Jan 2011
by
Gin Jenny
Y’all. What is wrong with me? This isn’t a rhetorical question. What really is wrong with me? Lovely Kristen of We Be Reading, one of my favorite people in the blogosphere and fellow Diana Wynne Jones lover, gave me this book as part of her blogiversary giveaway last summer, and I am only just getting to it now. What? Why am I like this? I was fully aware that this was a delightful adventurey booklover’s novel, and yet I let it sit around my Louisiana room for months and months, and then I let it sit around my New York…
64 CommentsReview: The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Published 20 Mar 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Metafiction. That’s another challenge I should invent, if there isn’t one already, a metafiction challenge. I always expect to love metafiction passionately, and when it lets me down, I feel hurt and betrayed. Like the book of The Princess Bride. Why did you be so lame, book of The Princess Bride? Atonement. Wicked after they left school, but particularly after, um, a certain event? That I don’t want to say because some of you maybe haven’t read the book yet? Slaughterhouse Five. Giles Goat-Boy. And then sometimes it is great, like The Unwritten, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Ella…
45 CommentsReview: The Unwritten, Vol. 1, Mike Carey and Peter Goss
Published 19 Feb 2010
by
Gin Jenny
For the Graphic Novel Challenge! The Unwritten is about a guy called Tom whose father – long since disappeared without a trace – wrote an incredibly popular series of books about a character with Tom’s same name: Tommy Taylor. However, it turns out that all the paperwork proving Tom is his father’s son has been forged. At first it is theorized that he is a fraud, the son of Romanian peasants; then people begin to believe that he is, in fact, Tommy Taylor, brought into existence by the stories themselves. The word made flesh. The Unwritten is set in London,…
18 CommentsGiles Goat-Boy, John Barth
Published 16 Jun 2008
by
Gin Jenny
This book and I got off to a rocky start. Last time I was at the library, I picked up a bunch of books that I thought might be good, by authors who are all those weird fantasy realists and postmodern and metafictiony. I got the rest of Salman Rushdie’s books that I haven’t read – except, annoyingly enough, The Satanic Verses, which is the one I wanted to read first because I was pretty sure I was going to like it the least – and I got several books by Italo Calvino, and I got Giles Goat-Boy by John…
2 CommentsThe End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas
Published 24 Jan 2008
by
Gin Jenny
Recommended by: Bride of the Book God I’ve been reading The End of Mr. Y for untold ages (perhaps an entire fortnight), with numerous little vacations in which I read other books for purposes of duty and leisure. This is because The End of Mr. Y didn’t really grab me – I wasn’t so much uninterested in this book as I was much more interested in others. It’s about a Ph.D. student called Ariel Manto who is studying (among other things) Victorian author Thomas Lumas, whose book The End of Mr. Y is supposed to be cursed, so that anyone…
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