This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]
This Book Just Tried to be TOO Much
In 2008, before my time taking part in the Cannonball Read, I read and loved Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. For those that are interested, that book covers the 1967 Best Picture Oscar race, cataloguing how that year’s nominated films – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and Bonnie and Clyde each highlight the changes both in Hollywood and in the culture. I suggest it wholeheartedly. When I […]
Essential Concealment
After I read and didn’t like The Innocent by Ian McEwan, a number of people suggested I give Atonement a try. Some of whom hadn’t even heard me wax rhapsodic about the adaptation. Oddly enough, reading The Innocent had made me really want to read Atonement. Everyone who suggested it, you were right. I really, really liked Atonement. Read the rest at Pop Culture Penalty Box
A Long Tale of Sight, Sound, and War
Let’s get this out of the way: All The Light is a long book. 531 pages long. This is the second longest book I’ve read this year (the winner of that award is still Afterwords) and man, it felt it. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book; it’s beautiful and visual and broken up into mostly short chapters of just a few pages, but it. is. long. Towards the end, this turned into a book that I was reading just to get through it, not […]
World War II From a German Perspective in this Memorable True Story
This World War II story is written by an American war historian, Adam Makos. Makos finds a story so compelling, he fights his patriotic instincts and centers his story from the German perspective. A Higher Call highlights the life of Franz Stigler, a German fighter pilot ace. Framing his book around the so-called enemy, Makos wonders early in the book, can good men be found on both sides of a bad war? Franz Stigler knew as a young boy he wanted to fly planes. His […]
Heroism comes in all forms in this exquisite WWII story
This book is beautiful, horrifying and a must read. It is a WWII story with two main characters—a young blind French girl who flees with her brilliant father, a locksmith for the Parisian Museum of Natural History, from the occupied French capital to outlying Saint-Malo, and an orphaned German child prodigy who gets caught up in the Nazi war machine which slowly crushes the light in him. Marie-Laure lives in worlds created by her doting father, but when he is taken from her and she […]
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