In Jincy Willett’s 2008 novel, Amy Gallup teaches an extension class on writing fiction. She was once a writer herself: her first novel was published when she was only twenty-two, and she wrote a couple of decent novels after that. But when her husband died, her motivation died with him, and now she makes a [...]
Archive for the ‘Contemporary’ Category
The Writing Class
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on November 25, 2009 | 8 Comments »
The English Major
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on November 24, 2009 | 8 Comments »
My book club, like a lot of all-female book clubs, tends to mostly read books by and about women. If we read a book by or about men, it’s usually either a classic like On the Road or a nonfiction book about a topic of interest like Into the Wild. One of the women in [...]
How to Buy a Love of Reading
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 11, 2009 | 9 Comments »
The handful of review copies that I’ve reviewed on this blog are copies that I’ve requested, usually through Library Thing’s Early Reviewers program or through ads in the Shelf Awareness e-newsletter. I haven’t received many requests from authors or publishers, and the few I’ve received haven’t really appealed to me. Tanya Egan Gibson’s request was [...]
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on October 11, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Mikael Blomkvist is in trouble. He’s a Swedish financial journalist, editor of a hard-hitting magazine called Millennium, and he’s being sued for libel: it turns out that the story he published about a wealthy and corrupt financier was false from beginning to end, and he didn’t have a scrap of proof for it. He’ll have [...]
Poe’s Children
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 29, 2009 | 12 Comments »
If you bought a bag of apples, and only a third of them were worth eating, would you complain to the store? If you bought a lawn mower, and it only cut the grass a third of the time (or worse, a third of your blades of grass), would you return it?
Poe’s Children, a collection [...]
Home Cooking
Posted in Contemporary, Food, Nonfiction on September 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As you can see from my reviews of Passion and Affect and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Laurie Colwin is one of my favorite contemporary authors. For me, her writing is exactly right, like having precisely what you want to eat when you’re hungry: tart lemonade on a hot day, or a soup with [...]
The Tender Bar
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on September 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I read J.R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar for my book club. We usually read mysteries, but in this case the owner of the restaurant where we meet offered to buy our dinners if we read this book and discussed it with him. We weren’t about to turn that down!
JR was the only son of a [...]
Infinite Jest
Posted in Contemporary, Speculative Fiction on September 17, 2009 | 16 Comments »
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling postmodern 1,079-page tome, was the center of a summer-long project called Infinite Summer. I had been curious about this book for years, and this opportunity to read and discuss it with others motivated me to finally give it a try. It’s difficult to sum up such a complex book [...]
Human Croquet
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on September 8, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet begins with a forest: the unfathomably old forest of England, created hundreds of thousands of years before human beings arrived there. At the heart of this forest is Glebelands, the estate (eventually) of the formidable de Breville family, who in the sixteenth century briefly had a young tutor named William Shakespeare. At [...]
Mister Pip
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on September 7, 2009 | 11 Comments »
On an unnamed island near Australia, trouble is brewing. The redskins, who work for the white Australians, have come in to put down the rebels, and the island has been cut off from commerce with the outside world: no more electricity, no more medicines. The islanders could be worse off. They still have fish in [...]
