My book club is big into nonfiction. I’m not myself, but I *did* really like Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. So I was definitely willing to give Unbroken a try. Hillenbrand is an excellent writer, and she really ups her game with this book. This is the true story of Louis Zamperini’s experience in World War II as a bomber, when his plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean. He and two other men survive at sea, where they endure panic, sickness, starvation, and attacks from all sorts […]
Best Book I’ve Read This Year
I’ve had Code Name Verity (2012) by Elizabeth Wein in my library queue for months. I think at least twice it came up, but I either forgot to check it out in time or ran out of time to read it. Part of the problem was I couldn’t remember why I’d chosen to read it. I vaguely remembered that it was a young adult novel set during World War II that had something to do with women spies. I was imagining some kind of Disney-fied […]
Out of Denmark
My final review for 2014 is a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), perhaps best known for Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. This collection is my first exposure to Dinesen’s work; the title and time of year made it seem appropriate. I have read a few re-imagined fairy tales this year, but Winter’s Tales does not fit the fairy tale model. In fact, after reading the first few stories, I wasn’t sure what to make of them at all and considered […]
“From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, / London, one moment fallen and forgot.”
I loved Westwood, and it’s increasingly rare that I love books at first read. I generally rather enjoy Stella Gibbons’s work (and I reviewed The Matchmaker here) but apart from Cold Comfort Farm, which I adore unequivocally, I’ve found Gibbons’s novels to be pleasant rather than stimulating. Westwood (1946) manages to be both comforting and sparkling, a Victorian novel of morality and marriage with a Regency comedy of manners at its heart, and sprinkled with the fragments of a modernist tale of disconnection, dysfunctional marriage, […]
The More Things Change …
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1994, this history of the Roosevelts and the home front from 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945 is a meticulously researched and engaging look at both the inner workings of the White House and the changing landscape of the US economy and society during World War II. Both the Roosevelts and the American public showed themselves to be extraordinarily brilliant and sometimes terribly flawed at a critical moment in world history. Goodwin did extensive research on her […]
A more accurate title would have been Uninteresting
And so we reach the penultimate book in my apparently neverending Booker Prize Longlist challenge of 2013. Apparently, it’s a “much anticipated” new novel, which I’m sure is the case for those of us who have read MacLeod’s previous novels and knew this one was coming out. As it is, I was blissfully unaware of either, but the subject of this novel was very much up my alley, so to speak. Set in 1940, it focuses on a maddeningly middle class family, the Beaumonts. Geoffrey […]