The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
“Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that was what they had been waiting for.” A reread for me that I liked better than I thought the first time I read it, but still not as much as I might have. This novel follows a young couple meeting, getting married, and beginning to have children. The first few children go more or less well enough, but they begin to start […]
God Bless you, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.” This is another reread for me, and one that grew in my estimation quite a bit I think. I might be unable to read all mass market paperbacks anymore as my age, my eyesight, and patience (and attention span) wanes, so my first read through was cursed I think. It makes me realize I need […]
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” This is a reread of Margret Atwood’s Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin, which was published in 2000, a few years after Alias Grace. I first read it after reading The Handmaid’s Tale for a class, and then Oryx and Crake on my own, and while it has some science fiction within the walls of the novel, this was my first realization that Margaret Atwood wrote other kinds of […]
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
“It was a death that began it all and another death that led us on.” There’s a whole sub-genre of medieval mystery novels, but there’s probably fewer medieval mystery novels about medieval mystery plays. Or in this case a mix of morality and mystery plays. Though I would bet within the 20 plus Brother Cadfael novels, there’s at least one about morality and mystery plays This is a short novel by Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for his very long novel Sacred Hunger, […]
The Ebony Tower by John Fowles
“David arrived at Coëtminais the afternoon after the one he had landed at Cherbourg and driven down to Avranches, where he had spent the intervening Tuesday night. ” This is a collection of stories and one novella. It’s actually a novella, three stories, and a translation of one of the lays of Marie de France, but with a sizeable translator’s note that kind of functions a little like a story intro. Regardless, one of the things that emerges from that intro, which is the second […]
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Another student review review. Here of Persuasion, which I have read now five times in the last year. So I asked them to write a capsule review, a haiku or a limerick about it: Lovely book with lots of marriage and relationships that people are either really excited about or not because of the money and land they possess. There once was a girl named Anne Third favorite of three in her fam She almost got married, But her dad got her harried […]
