The Female Man by Joanna Russ
“I was born on a farm in Whileaway.” I was thinking how funny it would be for someone to write a book called “The Male Man”. I have no idea what it would be about, but it would make me laugh. This book also makes me laugh because at times it’s downright hilarious. It’s hard to exactly capture the structure of this book, and a plot description sort of oversells how much “happens” in this book. Instead the book is a lot of other science […]
Virgins by Diana Gabaldon
A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon
Lord John and the Hell Fire Club by Diana Gabaldon
Lord John and the Private Matter by Diana Gabaldon
Virgins “Ian Murray knew the moment he saw his best friend’s face something terrible had happened.” This is a reread for me, but when I read it last time, the plot of the first novel and, worse, the characters were not fresh on my mind. In addition, I think this novella, like a lot of the novellas are probably meant to fill in backstory more than to be read first, as happens with a lot of similar books and stories I’ve come across, especially in […]
Voyager by Diana Gabaldon
I did the thing where the second I was done with book two, I immediately picked up book three. I would be reading book four right now, but I have to read some other things for school first, but that’s maybe a good thing to step away for a minute. Book three is a shift in the narrative in some significant ways. In book two, Claire and her daughter (Jamie’s daughter) have returned to Scotland in 1968 for various reasons. One reason is that Roger […]
Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
“I woke three times in the dark predawn.” I read the first book in this series about two years ago, the first summer during the Covid lockdowns, back when we were all taking our dumb little walks (I like walking). For some reason, I guess simply the length of these books put a hitch in my plan to keep reading them, because I found the first novel pretty compelling, especially the ending scenes with Claire looking into the morality of her position. At the beginning […]
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
“Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses with stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last […]
Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt
“The issue is not, I think, simply random inconsistency. There is, rather; a pervasive pattern, a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters in Hamlet. Is Hamlet mad or only feigning madness? Does he delay in the pursuit of revenge or only berate himself for delaying? Is Gertrude innocent or was she complicit in the murder of her husband? Is the strange account of the old king’s murder accurate or distorted? Does the Ghost come from Purgatory or from Hell?–for […]
