Mothering Sunday is the first Streatfeild book I’ve read that was written for adults – unless you count On Tour, which I guess you maybe could since it talks (albeit obliquely) about Victoria’s shocking flirty behavior. In Mothering Sunday, Anna, the mother of five grown-up children, has started acting strangely. She refuses to allow her [...]
Archive for the ‘Picked up randomly’ Category
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Josh Neufeld
Posted in 2 Stars, Heard about from the internets, Picked up randomly, tagged A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, graphic novels, Hurricane Katrina, Josh Neufeld, nonfiction on September 25, 2009 | 6 Comments »
A.D. is a graphic novel about seven people from New Orleans. The author interviewed these people extensively, visited New Orleans, took pictures, and then created this book. It tells the stories of people who left and people who stayed, wealthyish people and poorish people, black people and white people.
I liked reading this book, because it [...]
Gig, eds. John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter
Posted in 5 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged David Tennant, gig, John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, nonfiction, Sabin Streeter on September 13, 2009 | 6 Comments »
The Bible just got bumped off my five desert island books list. Sorry, Bible! It’s just that you have all that stuff about begatting and oysters, and none of my other desert island books take long breaks from being awesome to talk about stoning your disobedient sons! And you know I can’t do without Shakespeare, [...]
Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, Nathan Irvin Huggins & Oscar Handlin
Posted in 3 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged biography, frederick douglass, harriet tubman, Julian of Norwich, nathan irvin huggins, nonfiction, oscar handlin, people I truly admire, slave and citizen on August 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Frederick Douglass is my hero. Him and Julian of Norwich – an unlikely pair, and I am not really sure what they would make of each other, but there you go. I have been saying for ages that we should put Frederick Douglass on our money. And bump Jackson. Jackson is the obvious choice to [...]
Sex and the Soul, Donna Freitas
Posted in 3 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged Donne Freitas, feminism (and not), religion, Sex and the Soul on August 15, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I recently read Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit, and found it unsatisfyingly lacking in good stories; I have had the opposite problem with Donna Freitas’s Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Like Regnerus, Freitas is interested in exploring the intersection of religion/spirituality and sex in America’s youth, though [...]
Iran: A People Interrupted, Hamid Dabashi
Posted in 3 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged family, Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted, nonfiction on August 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
When I was in high school, and my mum was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology, she used to read us excerpts from her textbooks. Sometimes these were interesting, like about Jesus’s genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew and how it’s implying that Mary was sexually suspect. But mostly she was reading bits aloud [...]
Three mini-reviews
Posted in Misc., Picked up randomly, tagged Betsy McAlister Groves, Children Who See Too Much, diaries, essays, nonfiction, Regarding the Pain of Others, Stolen Voices, Susan Sontag, World Wars, Zlata's Diary on July 31, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger
We had to read Zlata’s Diary in ninth grade, and I remember thinking, Sheesh, if I were Zlata as a grown-up, I would really wish these diaries weren’t out there. They are just like the diaries I kept at [...]
Tricked, Alex Robinson
Posted in 2 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged Alex Robinson, graphic novel, mental illness, multiple points of view, Tricked on July 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »
My graphic novel experiments continue! I checked this out because I opened it up and I liked some of the things the artist did with panels. I still do actually – there’s a page I remember, where the whole page is the character’s face, and it’s broken up into panels with dialogue across it. It’s [...]
Ordinary Victories, Manu Larcenet
Posted in 5 Stars, Picked up randomly, tagged best books ever, graphic novels, Manu Larcenet, Ordinary Victories, translation on July 7, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I got this at the library because I am always on the hunt for good graphic novels, and it said THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME EVER or something like that on the front. I believed this because I’m easily taken in by the printed word. Fortunately for me, this may actually be one [...]
