So far my mother has only said overwhelmingly positive things in her guest reviews. I feel like y’all will begin to think that my mother likes every book she reads, and look, she doesn’t. There are many books, including some I initially think are a really good idea for a gift, that my mother doesn’t [...]
Archive for November, 2010
Review: The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt
Posted in 3 Stars, Heard about from the internets, tagged A. S. Byatt, family tragedy, I guess I should feel sorry for Bosie for losing his brother in such a sad sad way, The Children's Book, the writer/mother Olive was my favorite character and I was sad when we started seeing less of her, y'all should have seen Rachel's face when I said I was reading The Children's Book. Girl does not love this book., you can probably tell I don't know what to think of this book on November 28, 2010 | 61 Comments »
Have you heard of this book? It is as long as the prime meridian. I am not even lying. It follows several families of (mostly) forward-thinking artists and businesspeople from the late 1890s to the early part of the First World War. It is eight trillion pages of thick, lush prose, and if a book [...]
Review: The Sirens of Baghdad, Yasmina Khadra
Posted in 3 Stars, Heard about from a person, tagged Blixen is a better last name than Dinasen if you ask me, Islamic fanaticism, pseudonymous writers, The Sirens of Baghdad, there is this poignant bit when the narrator asks where all the other guys from his home have gone and they're all dead or arrested, why I opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning, Yasmina Khadra on November 24, 2010 | 20 Comments »
I checked out The Sirens of Baghdad to read it, flipped to the back cover, and saw that Yasmina Khadra is really a dude called Mohammed Moulessehoul. And I was like, Really, dude? Really? You have to write as a girl? and I made fun of him in my mind all day before starting to [...]
Review: The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander
Posted in 4 Stars, Picked up randomly, Sparkly Snuggle Hearts, tagged #teamtrojans, Caroline Alexander, classics, don't care about that rubbish Lattimore man, I don't know why I didn't invent Category Sparkly Snuggle Hearts like ten years ago, now I want to read fifteen more books explicating Greek and Latin poems, Robert Fagles, The War That Killed Achilles, this book perversely made me want to watch Troy even though it wasn't that good at all, Trojan War on November 22, 2010 | 35 Comments »
What was I reading recentlyish that talked about the Dark Ages being defined by the lack of Homer and Ovid? Was it The Secret History? Or The Fall of Rome maybe? Probably it was Tom Stoppard, Arcadia or The Invention of Love. It sounds like the kind of thing Tom Stoppard would say. Anyway, whatever [...]
Doctor Zhivago, Part 1
Posted in Misc. on November 16, 2010 | 31 Comments »
I have a gorgeous copy of Doctor Zhivago and I have previously enjoyed the book (by comparison with other Russian novels) and I have seen not one but two film adaptations of the book and thus know who the characters are. This should be a recipe for extreme, resounding Russian-novel-reading success. Instead of that, I [...]
Review: Three Empires on the Nile: Egypt 1869-1899, Dominic Green
Posted in 3 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged colonialism, Dominic Green, Gladstone is just rubbish, I'm meeting Rachel from Book Snob tomorrow! Yay!, nonfiction, now I want nothing more than to sit for two weeks and read dozens of trashy Victorian adventure novels, stuff I wanted to learn about because of Amelia Peabody, Three Empires on the Nile, why you should go straight home when the army tells you to on November 12, 2010 | 19 Comments »
Colonial encounters fascinate me. Sometimes I think that I will abandon all my other reading and devote myself only to colonial fiction and nonfiction. In general, I like colonial encounters by colonizing country in this exact order from best to worst: British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German, Spanish, American. I have a particular sneaky fondness [...]
Review: Contested Will, James Shapiro
Posted in 4 Stars, tagged Contested Will, I don't really think Nick Saban is evil, if I weren't apartment-hunting I could be reading your blog posts right now instead of going through housing ads, it makes me disproportionately cranky when people don't tell you upfront that their apartment is 420 friendly so you go all the way out to South Brooklyn and it's a complete waste of your time, it makes me disproportionately happy when Macy's puts up a big multi-window display of recreated scenes from Miracle on 34th Street, James Shapiro, nonfiction, upstart crow, very effective use of delayed gratification on November 9, 2010 | 37 Comments »
I am a fan of delayed gratification. You may not know this about me because, for instance, I whined so much about not having Monsters of Men handed to me the identical second that I finished reading The Ask and the Answer. You may suppose that a girl who reads the end of books before [...]
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