As part of my reading plan for this summer, I decided to try to take advantage of summer’s slower pace and absence of students to read a few of the really long classics I’ve had on my TBR list for years. The first of these, one I’ve been eager to read, is an 18th-century Chinese [...]
Archive for May, 2009
The Story of the Stone, vol. 1
Posted in Classics, Fiction on May 29, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Fables (Books 1-11)
Posted in Graphic novels, Speculative Fiction on May 29, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I mentioned in my Watchmen review that I’ve been hesitant to read any comic book series because they are so overwhelming, but then I started seeing various bloggers talk about Fables, Bill Willingham’s series that started in 2002 and has been collected in 11 volumes of usually five to ten comics each. As it happens, [...]
A Girl of the Limberlost (re-read)
Posted in Classics, Fiction on May 27, 2009 | 5 Comments »
One of the many things I’ve loved about being part of the book-blogging world is that whenever I feel solitary in my love of a book or author, I know I’m not. No matter what it is, there’s bound to be someone out there who has read the same book I have and has enjoyed [...]
Fire Watch
Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction on May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Fire Watch is the fourth collection of Connie Willis’s short stories that I’ve read and reviewed for Shelf Love (you can read my other reviews here, here, and here.) Since I read the large omnibus anthology The Winds of Marble Arch fairly early on, I had already read several of the stories in this wonderful [...]
Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, tagged Review Copy on May 25, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Steve Luxenberg never really thought it odd that his mother made a point of telling nearly everyone she met that she was an only child, often during their first meeting. It was just a part of her identity, like her name, that she thought was important and wanted to share right away. However, in 1995, Luxenberg [...]
White Teeth
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on May 22, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Back in February, Jenny wrote a great review of White Teeth and commented that she thought she was the last person to read this book. As it happens, the book had been languishing on my shelf for ages, until my book club decided to make it our May read. If you are among the few people who still haven’t [...]
Prozac Nation
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction on May 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s depression began when she was about eleven years old. Within only a few months, she went from an ordinary kid from an embattled home (her parents divorced when she was very young) to a child drowning in her own misery. For about a decade, she dressed in black, lay in bed, cried oceans [...]
The Silver Swan (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Fiction, Mysteries on May 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Last month, I read and enjoyed Christine Falls, the first of the Quirke novels by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). I was glad to find a work of detective fiction that didn’t withhold the most important clues and that gave me an interesting, but deeply flawed set of central characters. Now, having listened to the [...]
Rabbit, Run
Posted in Classics, Fiction on May 20, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I’ve been making good progress this year on reading some of the books that have been on my TBR list for years. With John Updike’s death this January, I decided it was finally time to read my first of his novels, the much-beloved, critically-acclaimed, widely-read Rabbit, Run.
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom inhabits small-town, lower-middle-class New England, near Philadelphia. [...]
A High Wind in Jamaica
Posted in Fiction, Travel/ Exploration on May 18, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In Richard Hughes’s amazing novel A High Wind in Jamaica, six English children from two different families are growing up in the lush wet heat of Jamaica. Despite the fact that they are quite young (ranging in age from twelve to three), they are more or less independent of their parents, ranging wherever they want to [...]
