I came across Connie Willis’ novel To Say Nothing of the Dog and it sounded like something I would enjoy, but figured I had best read Jerome K Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat first as it is the story that Willis riffs off of for her own. While Three Men in a Boat was amusing, I grew tired of it and had to force myself to slog through to get to the end. I think I would have enjoyed it more when I […]
Can you hear me now?
I like my alone time. I need my alone time. Accept for rare cases when I am totally immersed in a particular book, I can’t read when there is too much background noise: TV, music, conversations. I prefer silence so that trying to block out other sounds doesn’t constantly pull me out of my reading. I also often have a Pavlovian response to the various dings my cell phone makes. My body’s reaction to cell phone alerts is something like the nonverbal equivalent of Ugh!, particularly when […]
Sweet, farcical romance
Crosstalk by Connie Willis is one of the many books I’ve found from NPR’s list of Best Books from 2016. I’ve also read To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, but Crosstalk had some mixed reviews and I wasn’t too excited about reading it. I was afraid I was going to get stuck in an uninteresting slog of a book. Fortunately, I was very wrong. This turned out to be quite a fun and romantic page turner. I had a hard time putting it down while on vacation. Although […]
The Best of and the other of Connie Willis
The Best of Connie Willis The premise of this book, which is a little contrived and arbitrary–an idea that even Connie Willis discusses in the intro–, is these are all the award-winning stories Connie Willis wrote over the years. The issue of course is that these traverse many years, many time periods, many themes, and don’t necessarily have a lot in common. And at their worst, we sometimes get somewhat retreaded material from different parts of her life. A Letter from the Clearys In this […]
Another short novel by Connie Willis
This is another genre-bending novel by Connie Willis. I haven’t actually read any of her longer or “more important” works, but now I’ve read three of the short ones. I am not sure I have a “sense” of her yet, but I am thinking that a few things she really likes is to challenge genre conventions, to slightly rail against the loss of something within modern culture, explore love and gender and sexuality in light ways, and to put people together in interesting climes. In […]
I don’t know if you remember this…
but there was a small panic culturally in the early 90s when someone put like John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart in a commercial. I think it was Humphrey Bogart selling Diet Coke or something like that. There was a strong feeling that this would lead to old stars being in EVERYTHING and who knows what would happen then! Nothing would. Sure there were a few strange blips here and there where someone would pop up somewhere, but now we have Princess Leia and Tarkin showing […]
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