3.5 stars I don’t read a whole lot of non-fiction. What little I do read is usually in the celebrity biography genre. But for my Eclectic Reader Challenge, I needed to read something qualifying as Micro history. I didn’t even know what that was, but the internet was very helpful in clearing up my confusion. Goodreads even has a lot of useful suggestions of what I could read. As Bonk had a fairly high average rating, and was very highly rated by several of my […]
A historical romance with a refresingly realistic approach to class differences
Daniel Balfour, Earl of Ashford, marches into the offices of the Hawk’s Eye, demanding to speak to the owner. He is surprised when he discovers that E. Hawke is not a man, as he was expecting, but a comely young woman named Eleanor. She owns, edits and is the head writer of the gossip paper, and the nighttime pursuits of the Earl of Ashford is one of the most popular topics the paper covers. Daniel proposes to take Eleanor along with him while he goes […]
“One can forgive but one should never forget.”
Aside from the five stars, I also gave it four Tracey Jordans on the Hard to Watch/Read scale. Don’t get my wrong, it’s an absolutely beautiful book, but it’s also moving and powerful. Lots of emotions in this one. Satrapi chronicles her life as a teen in Iran during the unrest in the 1980’s. The cutesy, childlike drawings are juxtaposed against the atrocities they depict. For example, one panel is a short bio of one of her parents’ friends, newly released from jail for being […]
Road Trip!
One of y’all recommended this one, and I can’t remember who it was, but thank you. It was a great read and I’m definitely going to see if the library has anything else by this author, because she cracked me up. “Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.” So Sarah Vowell kind […]
You will not be spared the horrors, even from the comfort of solid ground.
I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time, and the impending release of Ron Howard’s adaptation spurred me to finally pick it up. It’s one of the better reading choices I’ve made this year. For the uninitiated, the Essex was a whaling ship that was sunk in 1820 roughly halfway between Hawaii and the coast of Peru; almost as far from land as you can be and still consider yourself terrestrial. The ship was attacked by a sperm whale, which ultimately inspired […]
Quadruple Cannonball! And some chicks on a boat.
My goal this year was a triple cannonball. I seemed to have exceeded that. “He was met by a collective shriek as the brides parted like biblical waves around him.” A few others have reviewed The Ship of Brides here, but in case you’ve missed it, here’s a plot summary. At the end of World War II, hundreds of women in Australia had married British servicemen and then ended up separated from them during the course of the war. In 1946, these women took airplanes and […]
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