Marisha Pessl arrived in a blaze of glory seven or eight years ago. Her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a critically lauded runaway bestseller. I read it and loved every page of it. Then, she did a Donna Tartt and vanished for aeons. I was about to give up on another novel being published when last year along came her follow up, Night Film. Unlike Tartt, the follow up wasn’t as critically reviled as The Little Friend, but it didn’t attract the universal acclaim its predecessor had. But […]
I paid attention to the hype
This book was the newest to me of all the books I have read. It’s just Jack and Ma in Room and they take vitamins and water plant and do phys ed. Jack talked like this and the book made it hard to read but good. We don’t know why Jack an Ma are in Room and in the beginning it doesn’t even matter. Slowly we learn of the world as Jack sees it, but being Outside (and grownup) we intepret and understand the things […]
“The Glory of Living” A play script Vangie13 cbr #49
by Rebecca Gilman “They did. Because they’re of that type. It’s just a thing that happens to a type. And it woulda kept happenin’ forever.” The Present. Rural deep South. Imagine a triangle, with the points being Murfreesboro, TN; Atlanta, GA; and Birmingham AL. Poverty. Poor education. Nothing to do. Lisa is 15. Her mother is a prostitute and she entertains her clients behind a sheet in the living room of the trailer house where she lives with her kids. Lisa has literally seen it […]
Likeness? More like Highly Unlikely
Tana French made a lot of noise when her debut novel, In The Woods, hit shelves seven years ago. I finally read it last year and really enjoyed it. So much so that I bought the follow up novel almost right away but have only just read it. One of the joys of owning a Kindle and living with a bibliophile who has covered every available wall space of the flat with books is I’m always spoilt for choice. So that’s part of the reason for the delay in […]
Midsomer Marple & The Dead Religious Guy
Continuing my brain dead decompression from the lengthy Booker challenge finds me reading the 13th instalment of the Agatha Raisin books. At the start of the year, for a brief window, the entire series (apart from the recently published latest instalment, the brilliantly titled Something Borrowed, Someone Dead. I’m going to just go ahead and say the death in that one is wedding related), was just 84p a piece on Kindle. So I bought them all. They are the perfect palate cleansers in between bigger and better […]
The Curious Incident of the Brilliant Book
So it turns out that I have a soft spot for the unconventional amateur sleuth. Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Flavia de Luce, Agatha Raisin, the list goes on. It’s a miracle I haven’t read the Shardlake series, really. One amateur sleuth to which Bauer and her excellent novel owe something of a debt is Christopher Boone. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s groundbreaking Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was never noted as specifically having Asperger’s and was investigating who killed his neighbour’s dog, which […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- Next Page »