I am trying to figure out who this book is for. It’s written as if for people who already know grammar rules, innately or expressly. But if it’s for them, why simply tell the stories of the punctuation rules, knowing we already know them? If it’s to teach people, well, then the tone is wrong. So what I think would have made this work would be to provide lots and lots of funny examples of punctuation gone wrong, but it just wasn’t there. Or a […]
Margaret Atwood and a little Annie Proulx
If you haven’t read China Mountain Zhang you should check it out. That’s not a ringing endorsement per se. I liked it a lot, but it’s strange and uncomfortable, but completely original and something altogether else. Same goes with this book. It delivers on its title. This is a collection of stories that take place after various and diverse kinds of apocalypse that could befall us, from the overreach of technology and medical fields, to zombies, to disease, to economic collapse and so on. In each […]
Even Canada isn’t safe from our horrible future
Not a boxing book like I thought it was going to be! I have read some Nalo Hopkinson before and that book was a kind of post-colonial, magical realist book about a child from the sea. I liked it. I liked this one too, but man oh man was it way different. This book is kind of Neal Stephenson writing a Jamaica Kincaid novel. Or William Gibson writing Gloria Naylor. Oh, with some light eroticism and heavy body-horror mixed in. It’s kind of Hoodoo Punk. […]
Another short novel by Connie Willis
This is another genre-bending novel by Connie Willis. I haven’t actually read any of her longer or “more important” works, but now I’ve read three of the short ones. I am not sure I have a “sense” of her yet, but I am thinking that a few things she really likes is to challenge genre conventions, to slightly rail against the loss of something within modern culture, explore love and gender and sexuality in light ways, and to put people together in interesting climes. In […]
Two Quick Kids Books
How to Train your Dragon Something about this novel doesn’t work for me. I think it has to do with the fact that movies absolutely moves me to tears every single time I see it. I find it incredibly touching and incredibly heartfelt and loving and wonderful. This book is fine and all, but it just doesn’t have that same heart to it. Not even a little bit in comparison. I think part of the problem is that the movie does such a good job […]
Odd collection of stories from a writer I can’t quite figure out.
So I have only read one of Karen Joy Fowler’s books before: We are Completely Beside Ourselves. I really liked it. It’s about a family who raises a chimp alongside their other child and its various fallouts. It’s good. But I also know her as the author of The Jane Austen Book Club which could be good, but I am suspicious of any book circulating around Jane Austen and her books because there’s so many of them. And then her other books come with a variety of mixed […]
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