I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was 19, because it was on the Oprah list, and I was still fairly new to adult fiction (true story). Becoming an English major unleashed me in college, and though I was not quite “mature” enough to really grasp the book, it’s stayed with me in the last eleven years. So I was delighted when A’s husband B choose Of Love and Other Demons as our February selection for my book club. We tend to read […]
He kissed her like he was drawing a perfectly straight line. He kissed her in India ink.
I don’t actually have the words to properly summarise the plot for this book, because I have so many feelings about it. Formulating them is going to be difficult enough. So I’m going to take the easy way out, and rely on the blurb: Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it’s been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply – but that almost seems beside the point now. Maybe that was […]
The world’s bestselling fable.
I have a couple of friends who think this book is the worst thing they’ve ever read. Of course, these same friends are also notoriously high-minded about a lot of things, over which we frequenly butt heads, but mostly I think they are missing the point with this one. It’s not meant to be high literature. It’s not even meant to be all that well-written (in the classical sense of the phrase). Capital-L Literature is meant to elevate, and to a certain extent, it’s elitist. This, […]
Grief and family and friendship and a ghostly alligator. Also – Cannonball!
Disclaimer! I got a free ARC of this through NetGalley. I have not been promised anything in return for this review, although if people wanted to start bribing me to read their books, that would be ok too. Kate Pheris has been a widow for a year, and has been sleep-walking through her life since her husband Matt died. Now her house has been sold, her and her daughter’s things are all packed and they’re all set to move in with her mother-in-law, who has all […]
A Tale for the Time Being
A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, writers and readers, writer’s block and reader’s block, hate and love. It moves fluidly through the past and present and involves some dynamic and admirable female protagonists. Small wonder it was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize (and should have won instead of The Luminaries). The narration moves back and forth between Ruth, a present-day middle-aged writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, […]
“It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”
Where do I even begin to describe a book like 1Q84? This was my first Murakami novel, and though I felt, at times, that certain minutiae for which he is apparently infamous (food preparation, repetitive dialogue and re-iteration of expository detail) contributed unnecessary padding to the 1157 pages, overall I found myself quite swept away in the lyricism of the writing and the surreal but precise detail in observing the world of 1Q84. The central characters are Tengo, a cram school (assuming this is an […]
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