August 2011
18 posts
Untouchable: Scott O’Connor
…the After photograph, will show evidence that the trick is more than a trick. It will show what has been achieved through hours of spraying and scrubbing and scraping and bagging, what future occupants of the site will believe, safe and unsuspecting. That the trick of the job is now the new truth of the room: Nothing happened.
The new millennium is on its way and some believe that the world...
A Tale of Two Castles: Gail Carson Levine
Mysteries abound, especially in Two Castles. A handsome cat trainer, black-and-white cats, thieves on four legs and two, suspicious townsfolk, a greedy king, a giddy princess, a shape-shifting ogre, a brilliant dragon. Which is the villainous whited sepulcher?
Elodie journeys to the town of Two Castles to become a mansioner—an actress—but luck is against her. She is saved from starvation by...
Art of the Novella: Parnassus on Wheels:...
ROGER MIFFLIN’S TRAVELLING PARNASSUS
Worthy friends, my wain doth hold Many a book, both new and old; Books, the truest friends of man, Fill this rolling caravan. Books to satisfy all uses, Golden Lyrics of the Muses, Books on cookery and farming, Novels passionate and charming, Every kind for every need So that he who buys may read. What librarian can surpass...
The Egyptian: Layton Green
All of this, he thought, all of us: the saintly and the damned, the genetic mutations and the flawless, the sparkling stars of society and the forlorn crust of the world, forgotten, doomed and legion. We have this ineffable gift of life, and we will never understand it. But we are here, we are alive, we are eternal for every minute of the day.
This is what you get when you combine Indiana Jones...
The Name of the Star: Maureen Johnson
I was super lucky to win a copy of The Name of the Star from a giveaway recently, I got all excited and the minute it came I started reading. I had chosen an awful time to read this book though… because it was night and dark and too quiet in the house. And then I stopped in a terribly dramatic place. So I am happy to say that, for the first time in a long time, this is a book I literally...
Escape to Autumn Pavement: Andrew Salkey
Yet the man had said, and I had believed implicitly, that London’s a big cinema of a city where trees are banks and money plus freedom is as easy to come by as leaves on an autumn pavement.
Most Caribbean stories that I have read have dealt with issues of race; the opposition between the Afrocentrisms versus Eurocentrisms. There are also those writers who have traditionally dealt with the...
Fleeting Memory: Sherban Young
So we’ve got a vanishing corpse, two people with no memory of who they are, a dog ‘piddling’ in the middle of a cabin, John Keats, a casino, the filming of a detective trivia show and a peculiar detective who has made a name for himself participating in trivia shows.
If you have ever enjoyed anything written Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then this is definitely the book for you....
The Summoner: Layton Green
So what does a Diplomatic security special agent, a religious phrenologist and government Liaison have in common? Ok so that sounded like lead up to a really bad punch line. One Night in Zimbabwe, at a religious ceremony a U.S. diplomat just vanishes without a trace. Convinced that there must be a rational explanation for the diplomat’s disappearance and because the man in question is a friend of...
Art of the Novella; The Dead: James Joyce
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
This is the second work I have read by James Joyce. The first I read a couple of years ago: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I enjoyed the novel immensely and promised myself that I needed to read more of his works so I...
Feed: Mira Grant
After a long and painful dry spell, I finally had a run of fantastic books! Feed made my ‘best of’ list in the first 50 pages. It’s that good. It took me forever to actually get around to reading it (I’m scared of anything over 400 pages) but thanks to the massive kick in the butt that is Net Galley July (I’ve had this one since March…) I’ve had very strange but awesome zombie/vampire dreams for...
The Fellowship of the Ring: J.R.R. Tolkien
So I figured since I featured the The Hobbit in last weeks Classics Corner post I might as well go the whole way and read The Lord of the Rings. Ah Middle earth, a place I love to read about but would never want to visit. So this not a review but just some things that occurred to me after re-reading for the I don’t even know how many times.
So those of you are for some reason that I cannot...
Art of the Novella; The Death of Ivan Ilych: Leo...
“It was if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it all done and there is only death…”
This is the first work by Tolstoy that I have actually been able to finish. I remember a while back trying to read War and Peace and failing miserably. However,...
The Art of the Novella; May Day: F. Scott...
May Day is not only my first book for The Art of the Novella reading challenge, it is my very first attempt at reading anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I like him! One of the things I loved about this challenge was the opportunity it gives to test out a whole bunch of widely acknowledged awesome authors. You know, those ones that you really should have read, without committing to 200-300 pages of...
Dream Smashers: Angela Carlie
Dream Smashers circles around an interesting topic: how an entire town can be affected by a business. In this case, the business is meth.
I’m going to be honest. I did not enjoy reading Dream Smashers. For the most part, I didn’t like how the characters were developed, I didn’t like Evan, and most of all, I really didn’t like the seriously religious overtones. If I knew the book was going to be...
Clean: Amy Reed
Addiction of any kind is a hard topic to approach. Amy Reed is good at it. While I haven’t read it yet, her first novel Beautiful is supposed to be a fantastic story of drugs and growing up too fast. Clean focuses on an older group of teens (16-18) who have gone way too far. Each has a reason, an explanation behind their destructive behavior.
The setting is particularly interesting, an...
Art of the Novella; Bartleby, the Scrivener:...
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.
So imagine you own a business and you hire some peculiar looking, forlorn gentleman, and when you ask him to do...
The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit is one of those books that I read over and over again. “Why?” you ask. Because it’s awesome! I mean, what’s not to like about a middle-aged portly little beardless men with hairy toes. The story is about a very respectable Hobbit. One who never did anything unexpected or went on any bothersome adventures. Until that meddlesome old Wizard, Gandalf, came along and locked him into...
Blow Me: Lennie Ross
Blow me is a quick read that balances on the edge of fun/interesting and meh. Like many books, it had it’s highs and lows and having finished, I’m not really sure where I stand… The writing was great. It kept a nice light hearted tone while touching on many of the issues single woman face as they get older: infertility, loneliness and dating in a world that seems to be completely focused on...
