When I first started reading The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. The first chapter felt like it was about dissatisfied rich people and I was not in the mood for that nonsense. Happily, it is not about dissatisfied rich people, nor is it about the theft and forgery of a Dutch painting, which is what I thought it was about after I decided it wasn’t about rich people. Really though, it’s about three […]
Do good work and share it with people.
A few pages into this book, I thought that it was really not for me. If I’m being perfectly honest, I only continued because it was a fast read and I’m several weeks behind on my Cannonball. It’s a book about creativity, and making things, and getting off your ass and actually doing it, and finding inspiration, and living a healthy life instead of just being a creative who drinks and stays up all night. I ran into some weird identity stuff here. I couldn’t […]
Faking It
Faking It is a rather carefully contrived series of coincidences, but then, most romances are. I like Jennifer Crusie’s novels because the heroines are rarely 20 year old waifs. Matilda Goodnight is definitely not a 20 year old waif. Neither is she cosmetic-ad gorgeous. She’s struggling to hold together a family and a failed art gallery when a problem from her past announces itself, propelling her from mural painting to art theft in a single evening. And Davy Dempsey, the brother of Sophie Dempsey (Welcome […]
What’s old is new again.
I spent a large portion of my teenage life aspiring to be an artist, and I surrounded myself with art books. Hell, my screen name (which I’ve used since the mid-90s) comes from a French Neoclassical artist. For all that, however, I mostly only read the books for the pictures – not the text. So while I’ve memorized every line in some of Ingres’ sketches, or Michelangelo’s sculptures, I can give only quick outlines of Leonardo, or Michaelangelo, or Delacroix, or any number of other […]
Cerebral and unapologetically feminist.
Taking myself as a reader out of the “ratings game” for a moment, The Blazing World deserves five stars for its ambition, passion, ferocity, and intelligence. It’s a complex book about a complex woman who is consistently undermined and undervalued (probably because she is a woman, and certainly because she’s an older one), and who vows to expose to the world the bias and hypocrisy of those who do so. It’s told after her death through a series of her journal entries, along with written […]
KITTIES!
This is a book. With pictures of cats. In France. It’s a gift book; there is a much larger version that I must get my hands on. Normally I wouldn’t review a book like this, but come on! It has: 1. Pictures of cats 2. In France 3. Coupled with quotes about how awesome cats are, from French intellectuals and artists. I also learned something – did you know that in Paris cat owners are fined if their cats are found on the street? Explains […]
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