The Best of Connie Willis The premise of this book, which is a little contrived and arbitrary–an idea that even Connie Willis discusses in the intro–, is these are all the award-winning stories Connie Willis wrote over the years. The issue of course is that these traverse many years, many time periods, many themes, and don’t necessarily have a lot in common. And at their worst, we sometimes get somewhat retreaded material from different parts of her life. A Letter from the Clearys In this […]
Man this book is funny
I remember watching this movie on tv as a kid. From my mind, it was Obi Wan Kenobi walking around Cuba and just talking to people. I didn’t like it. Thirty years later, I really liked the book. This one of Graham Greene’s “Entertainments” which are usually crime novels or spy novels. This one is more or less a spy novel, or more specifically it wasn’t supposed to be a spy novel until it became one. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba before […]
Periodic Update on a common Theme
This is a collection of two books about several generations of women sort of traipsing across Europe. I will review them separately as I read them that way. Sybille Bedford is a weird writer. She was born in Germany, spent long periods of time travelling around the world, was “more or less British” and then wrote about a variety of subjects. She only wrote a few novels and they were mostly autobiographical. I think she’s a little polarizing, but I like her stuff. A […]
Kitfeather Book Club Part 1
I am going to write this review in two parts. First, my impressions solo, and then a follow up addition after a conversation with my friend. We decided to do a two-person book club. I sent him a list of 5 books, he sent me a list of 5 books, and then we each selected 2 of the other person’s to read. The idea was to pick books we’d had on our lists for a while and get some help pushing through them. This book […]
A small book on authors and friendship
In this book, we get the story of Graham Greene’s various trips, stays, and excursions on the island of Capri. This is all told from the perspective of Shirley Hazzard, friend to Greene. Shirley Hazzard’s connection to Greene come through her older husband Francis Steegmuller, some 25-30 years her elder, as the two of them would join Graham Greene and various other friends (most of whom were a generation or two older than Hazzard) on Capri. For the most part, there’s no story here. Almost […]
I was worried when I found this in the Little Free Library
So I was both excited and scared when I saw this in the Little Free Library. I grew up LOVING the Far Side. I had t-shirts, I had wall calendars, I had a bunch of the books, and I used to basically just examine them to try to work out the jokes, try to catch the references, try to figure out what was going on both in terms of the jokes. So when I saw this, the problem was that this was potentially fraught: what […]
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