I have been slowly and surely working my way through this list of 21 Books From The Last Five Years That Every Woman Should Read. The latest book I picked up was Drink (2013) by Ann Dowsett Johnston. Drink is part memoir and part hard look at drinking, alcoholism, and women. Johnston describes her own battle with alcoholism: how it developed; how it affected her life and family; and how she was able to eventually stop drinking. At the same time, she describes recently-occurring trends regarding women and […]
What the hell did I get up to last night?
3.5 stars Rachel, trying to drown the sorrows of her recent divorce in alcohol and denial travels to London on the train every morning and back to the suburb where she shares a flat with an old friend in the evenings. As she passes the area where she used to live, she observes a seemingly golden couple and makes up a fantasy narrative about their life to comfort herself in her loneliness. She’s named them Jess and Jason and believes them to have a perfect […]
So I looked up the word “grief” in the dictionary.
Yay for us for picking this book for book club! I’m amazed and delighted and impressed by this book. Confident in its Young Adult-ness, it then refuses to pull any punches. I learned so much, and am so glad that “youth” everywhere have this available to them. I think it’s fair to say that we all have an awareness on some level or another how much the Reservations system has failed the Native Americans and Native Canadians across this continent. How hard life is on […]
Big skies, big animals, big threats
By the time I started reading Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, I had forgotten what it was about, and I’m glad I had because otherwise, I would have had my defensives up. I added it to my library queue after reading badkittyuno’s review last month. Cannonball Read: the system works. There’s not much I can add here. badkittyuno did a killer job summarizing the experience of the read, and the broad strokes of the story that Alexander Fuller tells. It’s a memoir of […]
Depression, and blackouts, and murder(?), OH MY!
If you are looking for a well written, fast moving psychological thriller in the vein of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant Gone Girl you will be entertained and satisfied with The Girl on the Train. Like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train uses an unreliable narrator structure to keep the reader off balance, revealing information bits at a time so that your understanding of the story keeps changing. It also features characters that are largely unlikable, yet strangely compelling, and keeps you turning the pages even […]
Riding A Train While Drunk Sounds Awful
I don’t think I’ve ever met a character who annoyed me more than our protagonist Rachel. That said, I see this as a win for the author, Paula Hawkins because even Rachel seemed tired of dealing with herself. Fired for months now, our alcoholic friend spends her days riding the train to and from “work” because she doesn’t want her roommate to know that she has been fired. This is pretty much a metaphor for her life–constantly moving but making no progress. The train pauses […]