84 Charing Cross Road- Helene Hanff 5/5 This is an incredibly charming book and was even a literary sensation that I didn’t really ever know about. More about that in the follow up. The set up is that Helene Hanff, a television screenwriter with a love of nonfiction, especially British diaries, writes letters to a British book shop asking for various books. As she gets her books, as she writes her thanks, and as the book shop returns her correspondence, a relationship develops especially […]
A Miscellaneous selection of books
Goodbye, Vitamin – Rachel Khong The story of this novel is a 30 year old woman returns home to care for his father’s debilitation into Alzheimer’s immediately after her engagement falls through. It is written as a series of diary entries and this format often creates a lot of the problems the novel has. For the most part the novel is well-written and interesting, and it’s generally heartfelt, but it’s also pretty flawed in a couple of ways that I think relate to its connection […]
I literally just said mysteries are silly
And this mystery is a little silly. It holds up, but it can actually be kind of taxing to read because he prose is so thin and flimsy at times that there’s so little to hold onto. But I was reading this (for the first time, even though I’ve seen the 1974 film and read several of her others) because I was interested in the possibility of teaching this book with a group of special ed 12th graders this year. The class is technically British […]
Well I liked this one way better than the first one
I read the first book in this series, Case Histories, about a year or so ago after having already read Life After Life. I thought Case Histories was a little throwaway (or tear-away) but really really really liked Life After Life. I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to read this one except that I found the audiobook and even then I was hesitant and kept putting it off. Turns out I really liked it. A lot of the stuff I didn’t like about the first […]
Just another old reread of Faulkner for this Veets
I read this years ago for a Faulkner class and I can clearly remember being “prepped” to read it. The grad students in the class who had read it before basically scared us into thinking it would be a hugely difficult novel, and to some extent it is, but it’s not Finnegan’s Wake and it’s not Absalom Absalom, even. It’s challenging but with the right approach there’s a clear narrative. The structure is four sections; three first person narrations, and a third person narration at the end. The […]
This is just an entirely brilliant novel
This is not a fantasy novel. The title purports to refer to a local silver mine near the town of Warlock (in the Arizona territory) in the 1880s. This is an overtly fictionalized version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral/Wyatt Earp story told through a series of different narrative views, with as much fictionalization as needed for that story, and as much collapsing and challenging the notions of narrative and mythmaking along the way. If we’re being technical it’s not even about Wyatt Earp; […]
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