Twelve years ago, my grandmother passed away at the age of 94. Born in 1912, she was the product of a different time, but other than maybe telling a slightly off-color joke or wondering out loud why there were so many more homosexuals around these days than when she was young, I don’t recall her being prejudiced against any particular group (except maybe Italians, but that’s a story for another day). Apparently in her final days in the nursing home, however, she started loudly proclaiming […]
Lots of mugs, dames, and goons–not so much plot
Christopher Moore loves language. That might be an odd claim to make about an author who popularized the term fuckstockings, but I’ll stand by it. If a guy rewrites Shakespearean plays with pornographic subplots he either has a deep and abiding passion for Elizabethan English or he’s a complete wack job. Now that I think about it, he’s probably both. Regardless, any time you pick up a novel by Moore, you can expect to have fun with words, and Noir is no exception. Noir is set in […]
This fire left me feeling tepid
I don’t normally take advice from the interwebs, but when I took a short “what should you read next quiz” that was posted to the CBR book chat page, the resulting recommendation intrigued me. Home Fire was described as a retelling of Antigone set in modern-day London. I haven’t read any Greek tragedy since high school, so I thought this could make an interesting study, to compare the classic with the modern. I have to confess, Greek tragedies were never my thing. I ate up all manner […]
Nutcrackers are like Sherlock, snowy owls are like Bedouin herders, and fairy wrens have more sense than most world leaders
It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a book about birds, so I figured I’d better remedy that. I do quite a bit of reading about animals, zoology, and natural history in general and at times it can get repetitive. In The Thing with Feathers, Noah Strycker spices things up a bit by drawing parallels between birds and humans. Strycker takes the reader on a journey of body, mind, and spirit while dazzling with tales of amazing avians, from the tiny bee hummingbird of Cuba (which […]
Droll and endearing, with a fair amount of casual sex
I always think it’s rather brave when I see a novel or a movie with a title like this. You’d better be pretty confident about your product, knowing that you are risking some smart-ass, less-than-clever critic heading their review “I couldn’t care LESS,” or “I could really use LESS of this book,” yada yada yada. Even if critics like it, they are going to be tempted to say something like “I want more of LESS!” So, points to Andrew Sean Greer for braving that potential […]
Through the eyes of a mouse
Having just finished a non-fiction work about evolution, I decided to bring it down a notch and read something very different, but still somewhat related. Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World is a lovely children’s book about a few days in the life of a white-footed mouse (whom we call Whitefoot, since we don’t know her real name in Mouse language). Author Wendell Berry writes with an elegant simplicity that is sweet without being syrupy. Of the heroine, he writes, “In comparison […]
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