This one comes down to personal taste. I don’t write very many reviews like this — where it’s clear the author was good with words and had a brain in his head, even some good things to say — but where I just can’t stand the way it’s presented. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I gather, was somewhat revelatory when it was first published, as it was among rare company in being a post-9/11 novel told from a non-white, non-American perspective. I don’t know very much about Mohsin […]
I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself
I’ve tagged “The Leftovers” as science fiction, although I’m not sure it was intended as such. The book opens with a great conceit: Over 2% of the Earth’s population has disappeared. Just poof, gone! Some think it was the Rapture; most are simply stunned and confused by what has happened. The novel focuses on the residents of a quaint suburbia called Mapleton and how they attempt to move on several years after the great exodus. I absolutely loved the premise. What would you do if […]
Where is the girl,
Where is the girl, who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoor’d our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We track’d the shy Thames shore? (From Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1865) , set around Oxford.) More detective fiction! But this time it’s actually from the interwar period–the Golden Age–rather than just being set there. An all-female Oxford college, full of clever, high-spirited girls with enough time […]
My Summer Reading is Humming Along
Every summer I bring home a bag or box full of books from our school library. I spend the summer reading so that I have plenty of recommendations for the kids when school starts back in the fall. My first read for the summer was The Humming Room by Ellen Potter. The description caught my attention when I was doing book orders this past year, and I found a book trailer that caught the kids’ attention when I showed it at school. So, with my […]
Like father, like son
I mentioned in my review of Horns last year that if I had Stephen King for a father, I wouldn’t have been a writer for love nor money. The shadow he casts is impressive, to say the least (and Mr Mercedes is imminent, about which I am very excited). So if it were me, the prospect would have been too daunting to undertake. But Hill dropped his family name and tried for as long as possible to keep his origins out of the press. It wasn’t that long, since […]
#YesAllWomen –The Novel
I happened to be reading The Handmaid’s Tale when the story about the UCSB shooting spree hit the news. By now, most likely you’ve read that the shooter hated women because he couldn’t get a date and that he left behind a “manifesto” and many videos in which he presented his misogynistic ideas. In response, and as an empowerment for women, the hashtag #YesAllWomen has gone viral, with women and men speaking up and speaking out against the culture that creates men like the shooter. […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 408
- 409
- 410
- 411
- 412
- …
- 434
- Next Page »