After reading the prologue of this book, I was 100% sure I was going to love it. That is not exactly what ended up happening. Let me tell you what happens in the prologue, as a sort of illustration: The book opens with this kid on the roof. He’s pretty much an outcast, and he’s been chased up there by his schoolmates. He’s wearing a uniform, so this is a private school, and there are statues of Saints decorating the roof, so it’s Catholic. This kid […]
I’m not going to lie to you. I mostly only read this because Eggs Benedict Cucumberbatch is in the movie.
Okay, so, previous statement about not lying may be slightly a lie. I originally bought this book in 2011 right before the movie came out. I don’t think Eggs Benedict was even on the menu at that point in my life. (I think I watched Sherlock for the first time later that year when it ran on PBS?) Anyway, I mostly bought it because I’d really enjoyed The Constant Gardener (and by really enjoyed I mean I FUCKING LOVED IT–that book slays me), and had also […]
20th Century Dalloways
This short novel, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, deals with a circle of women who married and had children in the ’50s somewhere in New England. Much of their story is told in flashbacks from a point in the 1990s, when they have aged and have lost many of those who had been close. As a result, we get nothing like a linear narrative, and that’s not terribly important. The relationships that these women form, the choices they have made, and how […]
A dystopian disappointment
After ploughing through the biggest of the big books with The Quincunx, I was, as I saw someone put it on Twitter after back to back reading The Luminaries and The Goldfinch, “yearning for a pamphlet”. And what better palate cleanser, I thought, than the opening volume of Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series? It’s a trifling 210 pages and it’s the opening gambit to a series of books that increase in page count as they do in scope. Bound to be a winner, right? Well, as it turns out, no. As it […]
What the Dickens?
Well, I said 2014 would be a year of Big Books and you really don’t get much bigger than this. Last year, when I bought my copy of The Luminaries, a colleague said to me “you know, if you really want to read a proper faux Victorian novel, you should check out The Quincunx”. As I pondered whether something could be proper and faux at the same time, I wandered into my nearest bookshop and picked up a copy. It is a HUGE book in every sense of the […]
The story of modern Afghanistan
Twenty-eighth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. I had once asked Tame SheWolf why she doesn’t like to read Khaled Hosseini and she had said that it had caused her too much pain when she read The Kite Runner. So much, in fact, that she decided never to read Khaled Hosseini again. I was profoundly affected by The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini even became one of my favorite authors. And though it left me sad, it didn’t destroy me. It told me the story of life affected by […]
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