I’m reluctant to give too much information about the plot of Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth. I didn’t really know what it was about going in, and I think that made it a much more compelling and surprisingly good read (especially for a novel I grabbed for $3 back on recognition of the author’s name only). That’s probably because lines like the following, which can be read in different ways and therefore reveal different things about the characters: “Unfinished business always comes back to haunt […]
One Hell of a Ride
From the moment Snow Crash starts, you know you’re in for quite a ride. In an alternate future sometime around the turn of the 21st century, a pizza delivery boy working for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc. is careening through town, trying to make his delivery in under 30 minutes (or face the dire consequences). Stephenson immediately introduces my favorite aspects of the novel: the crazy slang, the privatization of everything, including city-states called Burbclaves, the penalties suffered by late pizza deliveries. The United States has been reduced to a […]
But…but…where’s the rest of it??
I’m going to echo Caitlin_D’s sentiments regarding Love All: it could have been 5 stars if Callie Wright had finished the damn thing. Instead, it drops off suddenly with nothing really resolved. This caused me to spend the last 50 pages going, “How is she going to wrap everything up in time?”, then thinking, “Oh, I guess she’s just not going to?”. Maybe she’s going to write a sequel, but I somehow doubt it (no teasers on Goodreads, for one). Very frustrating for a novel with such great […]
Not your typical comedienne memoir
Rachel Dratch’s memoir, Girl Walks into a Bar . . ., follows its subtitle exactly: she splits her book into the three sections of Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle. Comedy Calamities: most of us probably know Dratch from Saturday Night Live, and the occasional “ugly girl” role in a movie. She starts with a hyperbolized call from her agent, in which she’s asked to audition for someone monstrously ugly (and likely a lesbian). She explains that she’s pretty much offered only these roles post-SNL (with a hat […]
I’d change my title, too, if I got Judi Dench for my movie
Like Caitlin_D noted when she reviewed Philomena last year, the book should really have been called Michael Hess, as Philomena only has about 10% of the work devoted to her. Still, it’s easy to see how Steve Coogan changed his focus when adapting the book for his movie, and the publisher’s decided to cash in on that by rereleasing the book (which was originally titled, Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search) In Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee’s family forced her into a convent to have her illegitimate. […]
Fear the Bareword
I somehow have been reading two books simultaneously that both deal with the concept of words that force action. The other, Snow Crash, I’ve been enjoying as an audiobook for the last two weeks and should finish soon. It’s very focused on computer language, making it a bit more inaccessible (though still enjoyable) than Max Barry’s Lexicon, which I just flew through. Both novels reference the Tower of Babel story, as well as the god Enki (remember him from the Epic of Gilgamesh?) and the idea that words have […]
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