Two weekends ago, I heard that Kazuo Ishiguro was coming out with his FIRST novel in ten years. Unfortunately, I have to wait almost another year until it’s released, and Amazon doesn’t have a pre-order option yet. So…I decided to revisit a favorite in the meantime (and sometime this next month, I’ll also be going back to The Remains of the Day for dissertation work–hooray!). Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro’s turn at dystopic fiction, and he really should do it more often (spoiler alert: […]
The Lives of Others in Hotel du Lac
I’m apparently on this 20th century British women’s literature kick (never a bad thing), because I followed up the splendid Jane and Prudence with Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, a novel that gets mentioned A LOT when you think about 20th century British literature or contemporary British literature. I figured after hearing about it from several scholarly sources that it was high time I read it, right? Right. As it turns out, Hotel du Lac is also a smashing novel. We first meet Edith, a […]
Jane and Prudence: or, Jane Austen for AWESOME Cat Ladies
Last November, I went to a reading and book signing by No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series author Alexander McCall Smith. During the Q&A, he recommended Barbara Pym to a reader wanting a recommendation, since she’d read all his books, naturally. I took note of her name, because I’d heard it before. In my own current research, I’ve looked at the novel of manners as a genre and Pym’s name came up. So, I finally got around to reading Jane and Prudence on Saturday night […]
On the (not?) eating of animals
I know that JSF is a polarizing author. You either love him or you hate him. You find his fiction avant-garde or too pretentious. I liked him a lot in college, though since my exposure to contemporary fiction has widened, I don’t LOVE him the way I used to. But I’m still in the favorable camp towards his fiction. But I think Eating Animals may be his most compelling work to date. When he found out he was going to be a father, Foer went through […]
Motherhood: In Constant Sorrow
First of all, I owe it to Fiat.Luxury’s excellent Cannonball Review for even reading this book. I read the review myself, and was like, “MUST READ.” I will not retread the grounds already covered by this excellent review, so you should read Fiat.Luxury’s review first and then come back. Back? Okay. Let’s talk. I really liked that this book was so candid, even if it was uncomfortable and heartbreaking. It challenged me to think beyond my very comfortable Westernized view of being a woman, and […]
War is Not Worth It
In the final chapter of her World War I saga, Pat Barker really turns the screws. You’ve become emotionally invested in several characters, while knowing that, since this story is about the war, it’s not going to end well. The Ghost Road, told in the waning, but most urgent, year of the War, really questions the notion of war, choosing to return to an almost-certain death, and the psychological traumas beyond war that can plague us. William Rivers and Billy Prior are again major characters, […]