tiny_bookbot – Page 12 – Cannonball Read 17

The waking dream of Alice Oswald’s sea-poems

Nobody by Alice Oswald

August 14, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

Alice Oswald’s Memorial is one of my favorite poetry collections. Depending on whether you are looking at the American or UK cover, it is either a “version” or an “excavation” of Homer’s Iliad, and the trick that Oswald so deftly pulls off is that she only translates the deaths, interspersed with some of the epic similes. Gone is all the plot, the rage of this man and the glory of that: she pulls all these characters together in the democracy of death. The book is marked by […]

A missed opportunity in a creepy, engaging story

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

June 11, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 4 Comments

I admit, I’d let The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires slide off my radar almost as soon as I saw the news of its publication. It looked a lot more True Blood with a dash of Steel Magnolias, and if I’m going to read about vampires these days, I want something real weird like Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, on in a queer revisionist take on Harry Potter, like Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son books. (Book 3 needs to hurry up and get here already.) But then a friend of mine mentioned […]

A book and a protagonist who are many things at once

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

June 10, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not a hardworking novelist, and often something of a genre chameleon: she has made her work in science fiction with the MadAddam trilogy, dystopian fiction with The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, literary retellings with The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, and historical fiction with works like The Blind Assassin. Alias Grace, her 1996 Booker-finalist novel, is another of her forays into historical fiction, and it showcases Atwood at the top of her game, with a subtle, elusive narrative that employs narrative uncertainty and distinctive character voices, as well as […]

An Native American novel “tender with significance”

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

June 6, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

“The sun was low in the sky, casting slant regal light. As they plodded along, the golden radiance intensified until it seemed to emanate from every feature of the land. Trees, brush, snow, hills. She couldn’t stop looking. The road led past frozen sloughs that bristled with scorched reeds. Clutches of red willow burned. The fans and whips of branches glowed, alive. Winter clouds formed patterns against the fierce gray sky. Scales, looped ropes, the bones of fish. The world was tender with significance.” It […]

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

June 5, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]

The “obstinate love” of memory

The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

June 2, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

The first few days of April, I was supposed to be in Houston for the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. This community of academics is one of my favorites, and this conference is something I’ve come to look forward to, not least because there are pretty much always four poetry roundtables, conference sessions in which a small panel takes the whole audience through a discussion of a recent book of Irish poetry. Handouts of select poems are provided for everyone, and […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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