My final review for 2014 is a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), perhaps best known for Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. This collection is my first exposure to Dinesen’s work; the title and time of year made it seem appropriate. I have read a few re-imagined fairy tales this year, but Winter’s Tales does not fit the fairy tale model. In fact, after reading the first few stories, I wasn’t sure what to make of them at all and considered […]
“From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, / London, one moment fallen and forgot.”
I loved Westwood, and it’s increasingly rare that I love books at first read. I generally rather enjoy Stella Gibbons’s work (and I reviewed The Matchmaker here) but apart from Cold Comfort Farm, which I adore unequivocally, I’ve found Gibbons’s novels to be pleasant rather than stimulating. Westwood (1946) manages to be both comforting and sparkling, a Victorian novel of morality and marriage with a Regency comedy of manners at its heart, and sprinkled with the fragments of a modernist tale of disconnection, dysfunctional marriage, […]
The More Things Change …
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1994, this history of the Roosevelts and the home front from 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945 is a meticulously researched and engaging look at both the inner workings of the White House and the changing landscape of the US economy and society during World War II. Both the Roosevelts and the American public showed themselves to be extraordinarily brilliant and sometimes terribly flawed at a critical moment in world history. Goodwin did extensive research on her […]
A more accurate title would have been Uninteresting
And so we reach the penultimate book in my apparently neverending Booker Prize Longlist challenge of 2013. Apparently, it’s a “much anticipated” new novel, which I’m sure is the case for those of us who have read MacLeod’s previous novels and knew this one was coming out. As it is, I was blissfully unaware of either, but the subject of this novel was very much up my alley, so to speak. Set in 1940, it focuses on a maddeningly middle class family, the Beaumonts. Geoffrey […]
Romance and Tragedy
“What’ll become of us? All of us?” “In the end, only one thing.” The Invisible Bridge is a novel about one young man’s journey from adolescence into manhood, on the eve of World War II. I cannot remember who recommended that I read this book, so I am unable to thank them for the recommendation! Although, I would have asked why they failed to mention the book’s length, which is over 700 pages. That was probably not the smartest book to start with for a […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 13
- 14
- 15