The Dig is a brutal book – both physically and emotionally. It’s also a constantly gripping and involving story that will stay with you long after you put the pages down. At its heart, the story centres around two very different people, and how they react to the land and animals around them. One is a farmer named Daniel, recently mourning the loss of his wife and struggling to maintain the farm by himself, and the other is a vicious badger-baiter and all-round vacuum of […]
It occurred to me while I was reading this book that I have been trying (and failing) to read the whole Booker Prize long list for a really long time now. The first time I attempted it was back in 2004, and I think the reason I have never succeeded in reading the full Booker’s Dozen of 13 books is that some of them I found to be incredibly boring. For every absolute gem (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I’ll Go To Bed At Noon, […]
Kivrin, a historian and student at Oxford in 2054, plans a trip to the Middle Ages using the well-established technology of “the net.” She must do extensive research in order to blend in with the locals. The history department’s technicians must perform complex calculations to get her to the right location. Her instructors carefully set up a rendezvous to bring her back. No one has ever traveled to the fourteenth century before. Kivrin’s favorite professor, Mr. Dunworthy, is deeply worried for her. However, Kivrin has […]
When my fiance started reading for pleasure again, but before he focused on hard sci-fi, he picked books on how attractive he found the cover art. And here’s the link to my review.
It’s hard to give a plot summary for this novel because I’m not sure there is a clear plot line. The narrator Marie gives us her life story, an ordinary life with love and loss, births and deaths, set in Brooklyn from her 1920s’ girlhood through WWII, then marriage and family. It’s about what happens to her, her neighbors, her parents and brother. These are ordinary lives but no life is really just ordinary. There’s always more to people than you realize. McDermott’s writing is […]
I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when I chose a 1300+ page book as my first Cannonball Read selection.
