God on the Rocks – 3/5 Stars https://www.amazon.com/God-Rocks-Jane-Gardam/dp/1933372761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512942968&sr=8-1&keywords=god+on+the+rocks Jane Gardam is most well known in contemporary circles for her novel Old Filth, which is a kind of running joke on “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” and so that novel has a final moments of the British Empire in closing feel to it. This novel is an earlier one, from 1978, and takes places during the war. It has a 1970s politics feel to it alongside the feel of the time period in which it’s set. […]
Whole Bunch of Tolstoy
This is a collection of “short fiction” by Tolstoy – some are like 8 pages, and some are like 200, so choose your words appropriately. For a couple of years in a row, I read Tolstoy during the weeks of state-wide testing in May at school. It’s a nice way to kind of decompress during the otherwise hectic part of the year. This year I have spent the fall reading this collection, and so who knows what I will read during testing. The Raid […]
Weekender Edition
Started Early, Took the Dog – 4/5 Stars Not the best of the bunch, but a good one to end on. Kate Atkinson feels like she’s setting herself up to write the best writing of her career. This is a good novel, and it’s still better than the first of the series. For those of you who know about these books, they are “mysteries” in the sense that a mystery happens, and as happens with the others, Jackson Brodie, her detective kind of mostly accidentally […]
Audiobooks and Orphans
Miss Queenie – 4/5 Stars This is a brilliant follow-up to The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry that came out a few years earlier. Like very few, but very potent sequels, this one eclipses the original. While the original book is heart-warming and touching, something akin to the Straight Story meeting BBC2, this book is downright beautiful and devastating. Harold Fry was about a man who receives a simple and cryptic postcard from a former colleague from the time he worked for a local brewery. His […]
More audiobooks
The Lying Games – 1/5 Stars Well I thought this book was pretty bad. It’s a 1/5 because what I thought was absolutely horrendous about the mystery became merely annoying by the end. For one, the stakes were so incredibly low for the actual crime, until they tightened toward the end, but mostly because, well, you can have a low stakes kind of book…so many contemporary novels are that way, but the writing has to be good enough to carry it. That’s what’s going in […]
Min Kamp part II: Where the picture of the smoking author embarrasses me at school.
This second book of the long novel is both more of the same and completely different. This novel should never be confused with the boring day to day details of a life from the beginning to the end, but more so a collected thematic explorations of moments, events, and periods of time in a life. This novel starts with a breathless depiction of taking a passel of kids to a childless house on a kind of vacation from Norway to Sweden and the various considerations, […]
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