I can’t tell if I liked the music scenes/parts of this novel. I really can’t, maybe because I just don’t care about the rapture of live music that much or more to the point, the times I have felt it, I don’t think I would have enjoyed reading about it. It’s a sui generis experience captured in a singular moment and so a description of it automatically loses the magic of it. I can’t think of something much more impossible to describe than this. However, […]
I like a good sober history book…
And it’s got a pun in the title! A not very funny pun. Hrm, a slavery pun does feel a little gross. Anyway, this was a finalist for the Pulitizer this year and so my local library picked up a copy and put it on Overdrive. It was a relatively short listen (read) and offers a sober, straight-forward assessment of New England colonies’ role in the slave trade. One of my favorite books ever is Changes in the Land by William Cronin, which details the New […]
The Final Putsch:
So this one begins the final push in the series. Actually, the previous two books did that, where we are no longer looking for guardians so much as following the orphans on the trail of their pursuits. One thing I really like about this book is that the orphans are pursuing Olaf and not the other way around. It flips the power a little. They are not as powerful and cannot do to him what he would do to them, but it’s a start. This […]
There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.
I have now in the last few weeks read a novel by a British author that takes place in a North African colony, an Egyptian novel that takes place during British colonial rule, and now an American novel that takes place in French North Africa in the 1940s. There’s not really a consistent narrative thread or theme going along through all these, but some patterns have developed. For one, in each novel, there’s a Western presence seen in each novel as a vulgar/profane inhabitant of […]
In which I rant about the TV show:
So this book began to give me the inkling of what was bothering me about the tv show. I have not read these books before and I thought, well, I will read ahead of the show and all will be well. But they screwed me over. I didn’t know that not only would they ruin the big surprises of the books, most of which I haven’t even gotten to yet, but they would do so for no particularly good reason. These books are mysteries. Plain […]
She said nothing. She kept on staring…
I know Gwendolyn Brooks mostly from her poetry, like most of us, and that she wrote one novel and it was this one makes a lot of sense. This is not a traditional novel. It’s mainly impressionistic, meaning meditations of a various set of ideas and vignettes and moments in the life of her protagonist Maud Martha Brown. We begin at the beginning with Maud Martha growing up and experiencing the joys of childhood, confusions at how the world works, seeing a gorilla at the […]
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