This is a book I had looked forward to since I first heard of it. A book about books and a special book store? Yes, please! To read the rest of my review, follow the link to my blog!
Almost Good
To be fair this is not a bad book, it just annoyed the sweet bejesus out of me! Almost English, is Mendelson’s fourth novel, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize last year and it is really difficult to see why! Ostensibly it tells the story of Marina Farkas, “a 16-year-old who has recently swapped Bayswater for Dorset, and Ealing Girls’ for Combe Abbey, a boarding school replete with every single ancient ritual and socially aspirational accoutrement that its paying customers might demand.” Now surrounded by […]
Life After Life
“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Life After Life is a story about living. Born in a snow storm in 1910, Ursula is a normal girl living a normal life. Over and over she lives, dies and lives again, rebooting her world, rewriting her story. This novel weaves a tapestry of existence. Through all her paths and choices, what could have been becoming what is, we see her […]
We Need New Names
I recently moved to Malawi, so as part of this year’s Cannonball I’m going to include at least ten books by African writers. Last year I started with Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart and then picked up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and then the superb Half of a Yellow Sun, which was one of my favorite books of last year–seriously, go read it immediately. We Need New Names received a lot of praise (NPR’s Great Reads of 2013, NYTimes’ Notable Books of the Year, finalist for […]
When neighbors stop being polite…
“In the old days, if a builder had a problem, that problem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete: it became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundations. But those days were gone: the lawless days of the 1980s and ’90s.” (321) The White Tiger was one of my favorite books of the year when I read it back in 2008. For that reason, I knew I would have to eventually get […]
Americanah
Last year I read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is a brilliant fictionalized portrayal of Nigeria before and during the civil war, and was blown away by both the story and her writing. Once I heard she had this new book out, I put myself on the 70-person wait list for Americanah and finally picked it up last Friday. Americanah is about a young woman named Ifemelu who grows up in Nigeria and due to the multiple strikes at her […]