Shanghai Girls was very uneven, not terribly well-written, but just interesting enough that when it ended on a cliffhanger, I thought “Good, I want to read the sequel”. “We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that’s been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, […]
Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy #1) by Ken Follett
This was a phenomenal book. I’m sad that my experience with Ken Follett novels for years was with his shorter novels, like The Third Twin and The Key to Rebecca, that I mainly read for the dirty bits (I think I read The Third Twin went I was 13–several times). I discovered him as a historical fiction writer last year when I read the two Pillars of Earth books, and knew I needed to find more like that. A few weeks ago, I started the first of the Century Trilogy, titled Fall […]
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
This was good, very creepy and hard to put down. I tried reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain a year or two ago, and his habit of writing dialogue proceeded by a hyphen instead of using quotation marks made me so crazy I couldn’t get very far. I know that’s a stupid complaint, but books that have formatting that I’m not used to end up distracting me to the point of un-readability. Nightwoods has dialogue written the same way, but there’s so little of it that it’s hardly a […]
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Go into this with the understanding that there’s a magic phone, one that allows our main character (Georgie McCool) to communicate with her husband back before he was her husband, back during a terrible week in which she thought she would lose him forever. Understand that you will never get an explanation for the magic phone. Think of the magic phone like Clarence showing George what could have been, or the ghosts giving Scrooge a tour of things. Accept that, and it’s a wonderful little story. “Nobody’s […]
The Fourth Hand by John Irving
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so “meh” after a John Irving book. But this was definitely one that I finished, set down and thought “Well, okay then” rather than continuing to mull the story over for a week or two while everything settled in my brain. Instead, I finished this book a week ago and I’m struggling to remember what it was even about. John Irving books, to be fair, are rarely “about” anything, but that’s okay because they’re driven by fascinating characters in absurd […]
The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin
I picked up Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener at a book sale because the title seemed vaguely familiar. After reading the back, I remembered seeing trailers for a movie with the same name starring Robin Williams in the title role. When I started reading it, I thought maybe I was mistaken–the trailers I remembered seemed to be advertising a dark, creepy thriller. The book starts out nothing like that, but it gets there! NPR star Gabriel Noone has recently gone through a rough breakup with his much […]
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