Forty-fourth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. Yet again I turn to a play by Oscar Wilde and yet again I come away entirely delighted by the experience! Every one of his works has his distinct imprint of acerbic satire and astute observations. While his characters are from the late 20th Century, his observations of the human condition are timeless. And while he is wickedly sarcastic, he almost always manages to convince you that in the end, people are essentially good at heart. […]
“More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”
I promised myself that if I finished my full cannonball ahead of schedule that I would get at least one classic that I had not read off my TBR list. That brings us to The Importance of Being Earnest, which I was reminded was on my list by Aamil The Camel’s lovely review. The best part of reading this play, which I’m sure many of you read in high school although I did not, is that it is still laugh out loud funny nearly 120 […]
Strong Start, Weak Finish
If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I’d have never read, much less bought Maria Semple’s bestseller, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Despite my less than positive review, the novel is well-written and stylistically inventive. For these reasons, it gets three rather than two stars. Read […]
Wickedly funny, and painfully accurate, satire of journalism
I loved Scoop. LOVED IT. I’m also slightly miffed that I never read it until this year. How could it be that this awesomely biting satire on journalism was not in my life before? What starts out as a case of mistaken identity secures a foreign correspondent gig for the reluctant William Boot, a hapless columnist for the gardening section of the Beast. He is sent to the fictional African country of Ismaelia, where he is told to report the war between the good vs. the […]
“Everywhere’s been where it is ever since it was first put there. It’s called geography.”
I’ve made my first foray into Discworld. There was an article on io9 that described the best way to turn your friend into a fan of your particular fandom. If I didn’t know better I would swear a couple of my friends either read or possibly even ghostwrote this article specifically about getting me reading this expansive fantasy series. I spent much of my life not reading Fantasy. I don’t know why exactly, but I feel it has something to do with having a tough […]
I feel like this series is tired.
First Among Sequels is the fifth Thursday Next book, a book series which is impossibly to accurately sum up, because it’s so weird, and stubbornly resists classification (on purpose). I suppose in theory you could start reading the series with this book (after all, I had largely forgotten most of the details of the previous four when I started it and it turned out fine for me), but you’d really lose appreciation for the little details if you did that, and a lot of the […]