The Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel
I am terrible at keeping up to date on review writing but we are 6 months into 2021 and if I don’t catch up soon Ill never catch up! The Lola Quartet By Emily St John Mandel (read in February) 3 Stars So– I should really write little snippet reviews when I check something off in Goodreads because then when I log in to write a review four months later I can write something more than “I feel like I thought this was OK but also […]
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
So, I am one of those heathens that read Station Eleven and didn’t love it. There are dozens of us. DOZENS! But I liked it well enough, I guess (?), to want to read Mandel’s follow-up, The Glass Hotel. It’s hard to summarise the plot of this book, as it is kind of a meandering mess. We meet lots of people, they are somehow interconnected, things happen. Let me pick one person, who I _think_ is supposed to be the protagonist: Vincent. The book starts […]
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
I spent the last several minutes trying to locate a passage in The Glass Hotel that demonstrated both the quality of the writing and the premise of the novel. I came up short. The problem with The Glass Hotel, which is a very good book bordering on great, is at times it feels steeped in metaphor that has no clear meaning the reader can ascribe. Takeaways from the novel will likely vary from reader to reader and I think it may change depending on the […]
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
To write about writing is a strange exercise. When we view stories, we usually view them, somewhat, as experiences, more than as texts. This adds a dynamic dimension, one that is difficult to capture when reviewing and critiquing literature. I talk from the point of my experience of the literature in these writings, but there is undeniable a connection, between the quality of language, of development of setting and character, and the use of the devices of writing, in how the experience of the reader […]
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Memorial by Bryan Washington
In which it becomes clear to me that a “best of” list means next to nothing. I’m trying (and doubt I will make it) to catch up with my long backlog list from 2020 and to actually reach my goal of 52 reviews. Putting together mini-groups to review together has made this somewhat easier, and yes, I know that some of my groupings are probably random. Here we have two books that I thought were fine. I probably wouldn’t recommend them to friends, but if […]
