You know what my favorite thing about this book was? And don’t think I’m saying this in an anti-Rebel-Angels way at all, because I’m not and I loved Parlabane even though his (spoilers, I guess?) farewell letter was silly. My favorite thing about this book is that the main character (I think I can call her that), Maria, has a mum that reads Tarot cards, and she reads the Five of Coins (our Pentacles) to mean a loss, but a far greater gain is coming. The very next day, I was doing a reading for my sister, and I realized…
4 CommentsTag: not much plot
I do not appreciate casual slaps at the South for being racist. I do not mind delineations of particular racist things the South has done and continues to do (that’s fair, although I don’t know why the North always gets such a pass), but I just can’t stand this unsupported assumption that the South is full of people ten times more racist than the rest of the country. So I didn’t like it in this book when the Mysterious (read: deeply aggravating and nobody in her right mind would ever bother with him) Boy Next Door, Dominic, says a few…
11 CommentsThis 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 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 Comment“Did someone die in here or what?” …. “Yes,” she told Andy, “somebody die die in here but I have, of course, since changed the sheets.” I read about this book here, and felt smugly certain that I would not be, as Powell’s review suggested some would be, “deaf to this novel’s considerable charm”, thus would not have “wandered away long before those scenes [the ones with plot in them] arrive.” They said it was like Jane Austen, and I suppose I thought that meant gently satirical and not very exciting in a Scarlet Pimpernel way, but nevertheless containing various…
Leave a CommentRecommended by: Between the Covers Ah, time travel books. You are so numerous, and yet you so often do not want me to love you. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Time Traveler’s Wife and me are buddies. Time at the Top makes my life happy by its very existence. It can be done. Apparently with Time in the title. (Just so I don’t feel like a big meanie when I complain about Doomsday Book, I’ll say that Diana Wynne Jones, whom I love more than my luggage, wrote a time travel book that I didn’t much care…
5 Comments