Damn. Look, we all love reading. And it’s probably also true that most of us want to, at some point, write a book, right? That’s not just me? Well, this book covers a lot of ground the ground that I had cleared for a book I’ve been playing around with. And though I’ll probably never write a book, that’s still disheartening. So this disappointment kind of hovers over this entire review, like a black cloud of self-doubt and broken dreams. Also, I approached this book […]
“Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”
Oh Margaret Atwood. I wish I could quit you. Seriously. Your books are so damn disturbing. I think Handmaid’s Tale broke my wee brain as a preteen and I have distrusted male authority and religion ever since. This book deals with romantic relationships, female friendships, the other woman and the perceptions of evil. However, unlike many of Atwood’s books, it is not a work of science fiction. Three friends, who met in college gather monthly in mid 90s, maybe early 2000s Toronto for monthly luncheons. […]
A Worthy Tribute
I’m a huge fan of Ray Bradbury, but I actually found this in the process of hunting down a copy of Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, which is included in this collection. Pretty much every story here is a winner, though, and definitely worth reading for Bradbury fans. Here’s a full list of everything included. I particularly enjoyed Lee Martin’s Cat on a Bad Couch, Jacqueline Mitchard’s Two Of A Kind, Charles Yu’s Earth: (A Gift Shop) and Julia Keller’s Hayleigh’s Dad. Overall, though, there aren’t any duds. And I really liked […]
Dancing Girls
I started tackling Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre a couple years ago — I think the first one I read was Alias Grace, and since then I’ve read 17 of her books. Every time I go to Half Price to see if there’s anything new (to me), and I’m starting to run out! Dancing Girls is a short story collection (her first one, in fact), and while it wasn’t one of the better Atwood books that I’ve read, it was still pretty good. “Everyone thinks writers must know more […]
Perception and Remembrance
The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize and Dashiell Hammet Award winning novel (2000) that spans the major events of the 20th century while telling the tragic story of the Chase sisters. It is an ingenious combination of history and mystery with love, infidelity, avarice, godliness, war and literary references woven deftly within. This is also a novel about women, class and perception, or misperception/blindness as the case may be. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, daughter and wife of captains of […]
A haunting reminder of what we can be: just boys grown tall.
Some spoilers below. My wife attempted this book a few months ago and it devastated her. For her, it was an unremitting wasteland of degraded women that, instead of highlighting the great strides towards equality that we’ve made, emblazoned the vast distance we’ve had to travel to become a society barely cognizant of the barriers still firmly in place. To read such a visceral recitation of subservience and lack of empowerment endangered her emotional equilibrium. So, despite near universal acclaim, I was somewhat reticent about […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- …
- 21
- Next Page »