Last summer I helped my boss chaperone his student study-abroad trip to Australia, and the class read this book on the plane going over. I was far more enticed with Air New Zealand’s extensive on-flight entertainment package, and so I spent my plane ride in the iron-a** challenge watching all six (extended) Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films instead. Since returning, my boss has been passively placing The Secret River in obvious places on my desk, which I’ve learned is his silent way of […]
I’ve been waiting for this moment for Cannonball my life, oh Lord
CBR10Bingo: Backlog (Cannonball! and Bingo! Woohoo!) After reading a few Sherman Alexie books a few years ago, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony started popping up in my suggestions, and for some reason, I thought it was poetry rather than a novel. Once I read the description, I put it on my wishlist, where it languished for several months until I finally bought a copy last summer at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on a long lunch break from jury duty. I’ve pulled it off […]
Every time I laugh I know that I am laughing into the darkness
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a remarkable and taut exploration of prejudice, history, and of course, memory. The book’s narrator and namesake, Memory, is an albino woman on death row in a Zimbabwean prison who is encouraged by her new lawyer to write her story for an American journalist who may be able to help win her freedom. Memory writes of the stark everyday life in prison and of the circumstances that have brought her there. But to fully explain, she must begin […]
I don’t want to review this book
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s novel following multiple generations of a Korean family through most of the 20th Century, has received a lot of positive attention: finalist for the National Book Award, 10 best books of 2017 for the New York Times Book Review, Roxane Gay’s favorite book of the year (according to the Washington Post). And from what I’ve seen, the reviews here at CBR have been universally positive. So I’m at a bit of a loss, because I really didn’t enjoy it. At all. […]
Everybody makes one another’s terrible mistakes
I read this book too fast. I didn’t intend to. I picked it out as my travel book for a week of work and visiting friends in Boston, thinking I’d chip away a little each day. Then I read most of it on the flight out and finished it the next day because I just. couldn’t. help myself. In writing these reviews for #CBR10, I’m beginning to wonder if the amount of detail I retain is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes […]
Don’t Expect Logical Actions from Racists
Thank you so much to caitycat! I doubt I would have stumbled across this novel without her review, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite some minor complaints about potential red herrings or loose threads. The novel is set near Baltimore in 1880. The North never won the Civil War because of the zombie outbreak that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, leading to a quick reconciliation between the two sides to face the common threat to the survival of humanity. Slaves were declared free, but, for […]
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