It’s a remarkable coincidence that I read this book so quickly after finishing Between the World and Me. It’s an excellent fictional companion, but it also broke my heart completely. You know those books that somehow grab onto you and just haunt you after you’ve finished? For me, this was that book. Rashad is 16, a high school student, and part of the ROTC. He’s a typical kid. And he’s black. One Friday evening, he enters a convenience store to buy a bag of chips. […]
Porn for Gryffindors
This time, K has our book club selection, and she chose one of her perennial favorites, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. I was excited—I’d never read it, my friends all raved about it and the Richard Armitage mini-series, and I liked Wives and Daughters (though some parts of it drove me CRAZY). Plus, I saved this up for my train ride to my in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving. All signs pointed to a promising experience. North and South is a story of contrasts, of class tensions, […]
Black Lives Matter.
This book. Oh, this book. I can’t say enough about it, because it’s timely and one of the most important things ever written. And yet I can’t find what I need to say about it, because there aren’t words enough. I was inspired to read it after seeing faintingviolet’s insightful review, and then when Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award, I raced to the library. In a nutshell, this is a book about being black in the United States. More specifically, it is about […]
Fun times with Elvis sex robots (no, really).
Hi, Margaret Atwood fangirl over here. I was SO excited that she was coming out with a new book, because I find her cultural criticism to be spot-on. I didn’t read ahead about The Heart Goes Last, but I was *sure* that her book would have some sort of cultural criticism, dystopian element, and wry humor. Of course, I was not disappointed. In The Heart Goes Last, the world is an economic wasteland. Stan and Charmaine are living in their car while desperately trying to […]
Marriage IS a blend of Fates and Furies
My friend S introduced me to Lauren Groff after I told her I had given up on Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! S told me she liked Monsters of Templeton a lot better, and after borrowing her copy, I heartily agreed. I also really liked Arcadia and was excited that Fates and Furies was nominated for a National Book Award. Fates and Furies focuses on the making and unmaking of a marriage in two acts. You must have one with the other, and each completes the other […]
The saddest homage to Jane Eyre ever.
This review is going to get nasty. Just warning you ahead of time. I bought Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale years ago when it was THE BOOK of 2006, and haven’t read it yet. I decided it was time to evaluate it and see if it would remain on my shelf or move on down life’s pathway. I went with an audiobook on my travels to and from a conference, which was not the best choice. This book spent a long time being very dull […]
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