What does it mean to love others? To love God? How far should we be willing to go to protect those we love from pain? How much should we be willing to sacrifice for love? And at what point does what we call love become something else? These are the questions that went through my [...]
Archive for February, 2009
The Heart of the Matter
Posted in Classics, Fiction on February 28, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Posted in Biography, History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on February 28, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Marco Polo, a history of that well-traveled Venetian gentleman by Laurence Bergreen, is simultaneously one of the most interesting and one of the most irritating books I’ve read in a long time. During the whole course of reading it, I couldn’t decide whether I most wanted to find out what happened next, or throw the [...]
Remake
Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction on February 27, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In the future that Connie Willis paints for us in Remake, Hollywood has stopped making live-action films. Instead, their CGI technology is so good that all they’ve had to do is patent the old film stars — Jimmy Cagney, Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix, James Dean — and put them into endless sequels and remakes. Terminator [...]
Kamouraska
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction on February 25, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Kamouraska, by Anne Hébert, is another of the novels I got to read as a result of preparing for the Québec and Cajun Culture class I’m teaching this semester. (I wrote about The Road to Altamont, by Gabrielle Roy, here.) As it opens, Mme. Rolland is sitting at the bedside of her dying husband:
The summer [...]
Cakes and Ale
Posted in Classics, Fiction on February 25, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham is an excellent novel about novel writing and about how life interacts with novel writing and how humans interact with each other. The narrator, Willie Ashenden, is a novelist with strong, sometimes hilarious opinions about his colleagues. In the opening chapter, he describes the successful novelist Alroy Kear [...]
Beat to Quarters
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction on February 24, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Beat to Quarters is, in one sense, the first novel in the famous series of Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester, and in another sense it’s the sixth. This is, in fact, the first novel Forester published about Hornblower, a captain in Her Majesty’s Navy during the early part of the 19th century. He went [...]
The Black Pearl (Morland Dynasty #5)
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction on February 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Continuing my plan to read one book each month from Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Morland Dynasty series, this month I read The Black Pearl, which opens shortly before Charles II is restored to the throne and closes with the 1666 Great Fire of London. So far, I’ve enjoyed the series immensely, not because they’re great literature, but [...]
Aiding and Abetting (Audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction on February 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In November 1974, the Earl of Lucan, known as “Lucky” Lucan, disappeared after his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was brutally murdered and his ex-wife beaten. Lady Lucan stated that her husband was the man who did it, but he was never found. In Aiding and Abetting, Muriel Spark speculates about what might have happened to Lord Lucan.
We [...]
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on February 21, 2009 | 6 Comments »
While in Bucharest during a year of European travel, Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull meets a French lawyer named Frederic and decides to go visit him in Paris. A weeklong visit eventually turns into a long-term relationship, and in Almost French, Turnbull describes her first years in France and her difficulty adjusting to the French (really [...]
Don’t Look Now
Posted in Bookish films, Fiction on February 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Before last year, I’d never read anything by Daphne du Maurier except the ubiquitous (and wonderful) Rebecca, but I’d read that about ten times. (Really. At least.) In keeping with my recent tendency to choose new books over re-reading old favorites, I read My Cousin Rachel last year, and loved it. This time, I chose [...]
