I’ve never read Cormac McCarthy, even though he’s on all the Must Read lists. And I’ve never seen No Country For Old Men, despite the fact that I would probably watch Javier Bardeem watch paint dry. It seemed very Western to me, and Westerns aren’t really my thing, The Road isn’t really my thing either – let’s not forget I’m the same girl who read Beautiful Bastard, not once, but twice – but sometimes you have to read smart books, and McCarthy is definitely on […]
This is not your father’s Lassie…
I embarked on reading Edgar, knowing only that it was a story about “a boy and his dog”. In fact, in the author’s own words: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a boy and his dog story for grownups. If I were looking for this book, the way I once did, that’s all I would want to know. Hide the dust jacket away. Don’t look at it again until you close the book for the last time. Read the blurbs afterward, like I do, when […]
Curiouser and curiouser…
I spied The Curious Incident on the sale shelf at my local library’s bookshop (aren’t those the best inventions?) and picked it up, not for me, but for a friend. (The same one who gave me The Brothers K and Shantaram. He’s also just given me The Beach, which is, in his words, “trippy”. In other words, he reads decent literature.) Without knowing anything about it, I proudly delivered my find, and a week later he called to tell me he’d finished, it was overwhelmingly […]
The story of an eight-way tangle of human beings…
Sometimes, you find a book that draws you in so slowly and slyly that you don’t realize you’re invested until you finish it, and then you can’t stop thinking about the characters, and wondering what they’re doing now. The Brothers K was that book for me. It appeared in my Kindle inbox with a sweet note (as an aside, how awesome is it that you can just send books to people that way?) and some very endearing texts about how loved the book was, and […]
Maybe I should launch a husband project…
I didn’t love this book. I know it’s a Cannonball favorite. It’s an Amazon favorite, too, with over 4,000 five star reviews. And it’s about love, and finding love when and where you least expect it, and since I’m a sucker for love stories, you’d think I’d love this love story. But I just…didn’t. After eleventy million reviews, I’m sure that you know the story. Don Tillman is a professor of genetics at a university in Australia. While it’s never directly acknowledged, the assumption is […]
About that time I hung a mannequin from the power line…
Recently, someone has come in to my life who was diagnosed with Asperger’s a few years ago. At his urging to “read a little about it”, I picked up Look Me In the Eye at the public library. (Side note: I am shocked at how little there is out there about this condition.) John Elder Robison is the brother of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors, Dry), and while I vaguely remember Robison from Burroughs’ memoirs, he reminds the reader that he and his brother had “different parents”, and […]