My Dog Tulip An absolutely essential thing to say about this memoir before I talk about it is that JR Ackerley is an older British man living in a society that has a different set of values about dogs than we do now. Two points: they didn’t pick up their dogs’ poop. The didn’t really ever get their dogs fixed. Both of these come up in detail. He absolutely describes his dog going into heat with some specific and physical detail and it is off-putting. […]
Two ruminations on life and death.
Johnny Got His Gun 4/5 Stars This book has been on my To Read list since I was in high school. A combination of it being a book my dad would talk about (he never talked about books), being in the Metallica video, and various other sources, it’s always been around but it wasn’t until I started this year out implementing SSR (self-selected reading) in my English classes and had a used copy in a book bin that I finally decided to give it a […]
Four Recent novels about teens: What I Saw and why I Lied; All American Boys; The Hate U Give; Confessions
What I Saw and Why I Lied – Judy Blundell – 3/5 This novel takes place in the years following World War II back in the US. Our narrator’s mother has a new husband who was off to the war and our main character, a teenager in high school, goes with her mom and her husband to a resort in Florida, right at the beginning of school. While she’s there she meets a local boy, a bellhop at the hotel, who is kind of ugly […]
Culture novels always reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold, so then I read more of hers too.
Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks – 4/5 Stars So I have read a few of Iain M Banks’s books in the Culture series, including the weird little novella “The State of the Art” and each time I read one, I think about how much it feels like a blend of Vorkosigan and Hainish novels. It’s not the most literary writing, but I do find it quite literary, and it’s weird, but not crazy, and it’s usually really good at creating worlds and filling […]
Odds and Ends
Pleasantville by Attica Locke; 4 out of 5 Stars This is the follow-up novel to Black Water Rising and like that one we follow the law career of Jay Porter of Houston, now 15 years older, recently widowed, and still holding down only a few clients. A mayoral election is in full swing, the historically Black neighborhood of Pleasantville has been hit by a chemical plant first shutting down jobs and then polluting the city, a wave of recent murders, and divisive politics set on […]
The Subjective and the Objective
I inadvertently picked up three novels that have a lot to say about authorship, narration, and the nature of reality as pertains to stories and storytelling. This novel is a small mystery (but a 500 page novel) about a maybe cursed diamond that was (definitely first stolen from an Indian village in British colonial India in the 1840s and then) maybe stolen from its “rightful” heir, Rachel, who was passed down the Moonstone by a hated and derided uncle who either was trying to win […]
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