Swing Time is a long read from Zadie Smith, about who we are and who we were and who we will be. The story is told out of linear time, and involves many flashbacks and continuing changes in the more recent past, building towards the final act, which also opens the book. It’s a little confusing, but it’s interesting to see how the narrator looks back over her own life and how her feelings change about her own reminiscing. There’s a feeling that her character […]
A Book That Rubs in What We’ve Lost
Like many people, I’m sure, I set out to find some of Carrie Fisher’s writing after hearing of her passing, and crying a lot over various tumblr posts about the fierce, proud, witty, wonderful woman we’d just lost. It was surprisingly easy to get my hands on a copy of Wishful Drinking, Fisher’s short, sharp memoir that’s largely just a collection of anecdotes about her remarkable and exciting life, and I devoured it in a matter of hours. It definitely did not help with the […]
Culinary Catnip (for me, anyway)
I’m a complete sucker for food-related books, especially biographies and memoirs. If you have a recipe collection with a few essays woven in? I’m in heaven. The Apprentice was a stand-out in this regard, since it had food, biography, and France, so I was completely unable to resist its many many charms. More uncontrollable gushing can be found here! Sidebar: searching for an amazon link for this book mostly got me links to a certain reality TV series, and now my delightful high from this […]
Paper Girls, Vol. 2
Where on earth does Brian K Vaughan get his ideas? He’s so inventive, creating fascinating worlds with tonnes of lore just lurking beneath the surface. Everything I’ve read of his provokes far more questions than it answers, and I love it. Paper Girls weaves a thrilling mystery, and I’m glad I waited for the volume instead of picking it up issue by issue, but I’m still anxious to read more! I can’t get into the details of Volume Two without spoiling part of Volume One, […]
A Modern Spin on the Underground Railroad
Underground Airlines made a lot of Best of 2016 lists, and I was lucky enough to snap it up at the library before the hold list got too long. It’s a story about what the world would look like if the Civil War had never happened, and slavery was still legal in America. Not surprisingly, it’s kind of a horrifying look. The protagonist is something of a bounty hunter, tracking down escaped slaves before they can make it to Canada and freedom, and his personal […]
Quick, and Fun, Like Riding a Bike (Not a Bronco)
Half Broke Horses is a “true-life” novel, meaning that Walls took all the stories she had heard and collected about her grandmother and wove them into a narrative, smoothing them into place in a coherent timeline. Since the novel is written in the first person, she admits to assuming her grandmother’s thoughts and exact words, and it’s probably best to just treat the whole thing as probable fiction – beyond that, though, many of the stories kind of defy belief! From learning to fly a […]