Seventeenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. What could one want from a historical yet fictional novel? That it be accurate when it is talking of history and that it be filled with spectacular fictional tales. In Foucalt’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco delivers on both counts. This is a book that is full of historical facts and some amazing conspiracy theories. There are so many of them, that every other line has a reference to some obscure cult or secret organization with events that […]
Life-long friends fall in love while hunting for spies
This is the second book in The Pink Carnation series, with events following on pretty much directly from the end of The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. If you want to avoid spoilers for the first book, you should probably skip this review for now. Eloise Kelly has discovered the secret identity of the elusive British spy known as the Pink Carnation, but wants to discover more about the gentleman spies of the Napoleonic era. She goes with Colin Selwick to his country house, to search through the […]
Metaphorical poetry masquerading as prose
Sixteenth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. This is a feeler’s book. While you’re reading this book, you don’t think through the story, you feel your way through it. You are taken on an epic journey through a century of existence – subdued passions, resigned fates, a grudging surrender to the onslaught of time that is made inevitable by the mere act of existing. You will feel the layers of time peel away and color your senses with their distinctive hues, as seen […]
For the Greater Good?
Others have reviewed this for Cannonball Read already, so here are the basics in case you missed it: Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who died at Johns Hopkins, where she had been admitted due to complications from cervical cancer. She had radium treatment at one point, and when she received the treatment, a biopsy of her tumor was taken at the request of a researcher. From there, the cells were cultured and became some of the first that would grow, and keep on growing, […]
Morning in Angola
Book 4 of 10 African novels! The author, Ondjaki, is quite prolific, and I’d never heard of him before specifically seeking out African authors! In my search for African authors and novels, I’ve found it’s pretty easy to find novels about the immigrant (Africa-to-US) experience, but harder to find accessible (and English!) novels by Africans who still live in and write about their home country. So I was glad to find this little novel, which is unlike any other Africa-related books on my list. This […]
While I did enjoy it, not a lot of the Twentieth Wife stuck with me. It was a decent historical fiction about the rise of Mehunrissa through her marriage to Jahangir, Emperor of the 15th century Moghul Empire. It’s perhaps the result of our history, but it seems like most historical fiction marketed to women are about the political maneuvering of a woman working her way through a harem, a sea of ladies in waiting, or a royal court of some sort and attaching herself to the […]
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