Malorie Monsard returns to the south of France, where she grew up, having left on a hike after finishing high school and made enough money in Paris to put herself through business school. Having felt like an outcast while growing up, due to the legacy of her great-grandfather who betrayed resistance members to the Gestapo, and a narcissistic father who would manipulate her, her mother, her sisters and her grandmother, and charm, lie and steal his way until he finally met an unglamourous end in […]
Art is an incitement to look at our world through another’s eyes
While Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life is nearly twenty years old, the first I heard of it was on a 2015 episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast. If you’re unfamiliar with Ferriss, he is outwardly a life-hacking blogger and podcaster. However, his deeper drive seems to be helping others live an examined life. I like that, so even though I’m not a life-hacky guy I listen to his show. On that 2015 episode, I found Botton to be especially charming, and I was […]
Too rich
2.5 stars There is no way that this isn’t going to sound like splitting hairs given the genre, but The Chocolate Rose is a very, very hearts and flowers romance novella that is… too romantic? Everything is expressed so very ardently, and I totally get the appeal, but it’s not for me. This book is very But I’m more here for So, like, witticisms and sarcasm. The level of romantic proclamations on display go a long way to mask the fact that, for me, there […]
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
I will admit, I thought I might be out-smarting these books, with the formula all figured out, but this one, the third in the “Temeraire” series, totally took me on a ride. Delightful, surprising, and exciting. Well played, Novik. Black Powder War bothers with barely any passage of time after Throne of Jade. The company is still in China, preparing for travel back to England, when natural disaster and politics coincide and intervene, causing Laurence and Temeraire to take their scrappy crew of aviators overland […]
Huge Disappointment
This book was a huge disappointment. I have read two other Florand’s (The Chocolate Kiss – 5 stars, and The Chocolate Touch – 4.5 stars) and really loved both. This book did not hold a candle to either of them. The writing was very uneven and some of the ideas either repeated too often or not fully fleshed out. It reminded me of when I would write term papers in school and write the same thoughts several different ways, and then go back and pick […]
Someone pay me to travel around Europe eating tasty food and kissing cute boys.
Lucy Knisley is a delightful, talented human being, and I will read every book she chooses to publish. This particular book is a record of her travels to Europe over the summer of 2011. She was invited to speak at a Norwegian comics convention in Bergen, and used the opportunity to travel to Sweden to visit a man she’d met several weeks before when he was vacationing in New York City. She also travels to France (Paris, and another city of which I’ve since forgotten […]
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