Two different friends recommended Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters to me, so I decided to give it a try. Plus, while I have my booklist for my fall class set, I am interested in expanding my own knowledge base, particularly writers throughout Southern Asia. Dogeaters is a hard-to-describe novel. It’s a series of vignettes set during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. There are aspiring film stars, junkies, powerful families and their wayward children, and many more individuals who give voice to the novel. The “heart” of […]
The dangers of cauliflower gratin and other lessons from Barbara Pym
Apparently, the last novel of Pym’s I have to read was also the first novel she published in the UK. I basically have jumped around her “canon” and am now reading the first novel last. I was interested to see how her first novel would shape her career, and it’s filled with what would be considered her “trademark” in her novels. Some Tame Gazelle focuses on Belinda and Harriet, two fifty-something sisters who live together, unmarried. Belinda has languished in love–the object of 30 years’ […]
Humanity: less than angels.
I’m winding down to the last Pym novels in my library stack (and that she wrote) and feeling sort of melancholy that I can’t read her again for the first time. Ah, well. It’s the danger of binge-reading a new favorite author. I’m just glad I get to share her here on CBR (and hooray to those of you who are reading her!!!) Pym tackles anthropologists and academics again in Less Than Angels. Here, a love triangle emerges between Tom, a dissertating anthropologist, Catherine, a […]
Love and academia: two subjects ripe for examination
Yay! More Barbara Pym! Aren’t you all excited? [on a serious note, this was a delightful experiment, and I am *so* glad I was determined to “collect” her] This time, the “excellent woman” makes a reappearance and Dulcie Mainwaring (don’t you love the name?) is the protagonist. Shortly after her engagement ends, Dulcie attends an academic conference. There, she meets the wary and reserved Viola Dace, and becomes tangentially acquainted with scholar and presenter Aylwin Forbes. We learn that Viola had once had an affair […]
So much wasted potential.
I know we’re experiencing a kind of glut in dystopian fiction these days, but I do honestly enjoy the genre when it’s done well (my go-to examples are still always going to be Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I am teaching this fall and SUPER excited about). I look for other examples by authors I haven’t read, and The Dead Lands was one such text. I’ve never read anything by Benjamin Percy, but one of my Facebook friends […]
That time Mary Robinette Kowal liked me on Goodreads.
I spent last year on a Mary Robinette Kowal bender with her Glamourist Histories series, and have spent all of 2015 waiting VERY IMPATIENTLY for the last book to come out this spring. Very impatiently. So when my library system *finally* ordered its copies, I greedily placed my hold and then waited AGAIN until I got my copy. And then of course, an enormous stack with earlier due dates, as well as my graduation, put that reading on hold again. With all this anticipation, this […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- …
- 122
- Next Page »