The Luminaries is a big book that requires a lot of you attention. So let me preface this review by saying that you should absolutely read The Luminaries. An easy read? No. But a very rewarding one. The plot is fairly straight-forward and, like so many things, borrows heavily, knowingly and jestingly from Victorian tradition. The place is New Zealand, the year is 1866. The New Zealand Gold Rush is in full swing in the tiny coastal town of Hokitika. Stranger Walter Moody, hoping to […]
Man Booker 2015–nothing brief about this weighty book!
I make it a point to read the winner of the Man Booker Award each year. I’ve managed to accomplish this task for the last three years running, even if I have to wait a bit at the library for the book. I don’t always get to the shortlist nominees, however. And sometimes, my predictions for the winner are wrong. Of the 2015 shortlisted books, I’d only read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (which I thought was very good), so I’d been pulling for that one. […]
Trapped in Faulty Memories
I am so behind in reviews, it’s ridiculous (for me – I know some of you get WAY behind but I’m usually getting reviews up within 48 hours of completing a book. I finished this book two weeks ago). I blame life getting busy and choosing to not take my laptop on vacation. I finished a bunch of books, but had no way of writing and posting my reviews so they languished. But mostly I blame this book because I have a need to review […]
A lost empire is still lost.
In my quest to read more international Anglophone works, I sort of got sidetracked by other books from the library. So reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai is a way for me to get back on track a bit. It’s also the 2006 Man Booker Prize Winner, so hooray for checking another Booker title off my list! I really appreciated the themes in this novel, even if it was sometimes a bit dense or unfamiliar (but that’s a good thing, I believe). The […]
A beautiful, complex doorstop of a novel that needs to be a BBC mini-series. Like, right now.
Ever since The Luminaries was announced as 2013’s Man Booker Prize winner, I have been intrigued to read it. When I heard that Eleanor Catton, the author, was my age, I immediately felt depressed that I have not even finished my (about) 200-page dissertation, when Ms. Catton quadrupled my page count. The sheer size discouraged me from picking it up before now (and I felt rather foolish for borrowing this tome, thinking I would just have to return it to the library). And then I […]
Two former lovers of Molly Lane.
Honestly, if this book was written by any other author than Ian McEwan, it would have gotten two stars from me. But it was written by Ian McEwan, and there’s just something about the way he strings his words together that enchants me, regardless of how interesting I find whatever else is going on in his books at the time. Amsterdam is thankfully a concise book (with relatively large typeface and small pages), so no great investment of time on my part. The catalyst to the […]