It was entertaining. But I am not a huge fan of animated film. So you know, I though it was sweet and funny enough but I am not the person you want to come to for reviews of such. My dad, however, LOVED it and you can read what he had to say here.
It’s possible you remember me going to my parents’ house for Christmas 2005 and re-reading all my mom’s Cherry Ames books, ’50s novels about a girl who becomes a nurse and inadvertently solves little mysteries. (See the end of the 2005 reading list or the beginning of 2006 or search for Cherry Ames on this page.)
And then I got back to Chicago and went a little crazy on eBay buying up copies for myself. And then I found that the women who wrote Cherry Ames also wrote books about a flight attendant named Vicki Barr.
I don’t find them quite as enthralling as the Cherry Ames series (I say this one book in), but it could be because when I read Cherry Ames I am enthralled with all this childhood nostalgia and that’s just not present reading the Vicki books for the first time. But they’re still fun. Full of totally non-PC sexist garbage that can either make you mad (eh, why bother) or make you laugh (that’s my response), they’re almost pedantic. Were they written to be pseudo instructional books for girls on possible careers? Be a Nurse (in Ames’ case) / Flight Attendant (Barr) and Solve Mysteries! YAY! 🙂 Ha!
Gifted to me by Ginger.
A lot of people in these stories have reached their limit and the story concentrates on them at their last efforts, their last decisive actions. The woman in Sinking House, Zoltan in The Human Fly, Anthony in King Bee. More based in reality (or “our” reality) than say the Greenman stories I read earlier in the month, but that just makes the unexpected even more jolting when it happens.
Really good, I’ll definitely be seeking out more T.C. Boyle.
A very intense book about a messed-up mother/daughter relationship with lots of cool photography stuff to boot. I doubt anyone with knowledge of 20th century photography can read this without thinking of Sally Mann’s photographs. (However, while Mann shot all three of her children, the photographer in the book concentrates only on the one daughter.) It was sometimes a tough read (my overly enhanced Piscean empathy gets me way too involved in fictional conflicts!), but I thought it was completely engaging and I may have stayed up until 3 a.m. finishing it. Really loved it.
Alec Waugh = Evelyn’s brother. I read about his books in Slightly Foxed and then sought some out on my most recent trip to Myopic (conveniently located down the block from my haircut so I’m there quite often). This is subtitled “an erotic comedy” and I remember wondering for the first, oh say, 40 pages or so when exactly that was going to kick in. (But it does, no worries. Hee hee.) Apparently (per the book jacket), this is a spoof on “Anonymous Underground Victorian Novels” and I did find it quite silly at times. Silly mingled with a lil “Eyes Wide Shut” wannabe action.
I’ve read more short stories in the past few years than ever before (I mostly blame Elizabeth Crane for that. “Blame” being a good thing in this scenario), and still I thought these were really unusual.
But now that two months have gone by… I can’t pinpoint exactly why that was. I will say that they were all really truly individuals. I’m sure you’ve come across short story collections that as you read through them, the narrators and/or subjects tend to blur together (when they weren’t intended to, although there are collection that intend that) and it seems you’ve just read a novel with some bits that don’t seem to fit together. No question of that happening here. I think my favorite was “Oh Lord Why Not” where everyone has a hit pop song in them.
Pretty short collection though. Big print, small pages. Not a book that takes long to get through.
Soooooo good. I’ve recommended short stories by Lanagan to you before (here or here), and I believe this is her first novel. I will be eternally in Marrije‘s debt for introducing me to such a great author.
This is earthy, dark, bitter, spiky, sexy and tactile. It’s also sweet and loving and tender at times. The bad is often quite brutal, often in metaphor, and the good is quite poignant.
I was a little surprised it was classed as YA. Certainly the fairy tales of our/my youth flirted with just as much danger. But I don’t remember them being as powerful. Perhaps if I re-read them today, I would find myself gripping the book like an anchor and crying through chapters as I did here. But I doubt it.
So Good!!!
This was our challenge book for December. So much fun!!! Dad had read it back in high school and been totally traumatized. Then at some point watched the Orson Welles film of it and found it equally traumatizing. But somehow, to both of us, this time around it was just soooo farcical. Might make a good companion for a book we read earlier in the year “The Good Soldier Svejk”.
The end is a bit of a shocker just because the narrator has, for the most part, taken things so lightly until then that you sort of expect it to just keep going on forever. It was a lot of fun to read.
So good. So sad. With Lodge, as with Philip Roth, as he gets older, more infirm and perhaps crankier, so do his characters. I loved the diary-style writing. I loved the tone.
Really only one thing rang false to me and that was an extensive description of a pair of breasts (and how the narrator could tell they were natural) on page 5 (only the third page of actual text). I actually called my dad and asked if that paragraph stuck out like a sore thumb to him as well. AND IT DID. So it wasn’t just a girlreaction, yo.
It was interesting in reading this to think about how there never stops being a time in life when you can inadvertently make bad decisions, or make so-so decisions that cascade into much worse events. Something I think most of us assume will cease to happen as we age.
Really good, but I think I would read other Lodge before this one, if I were to try him for the first time. “Small World” and “Changing Places” are both really great.
In my library this is classified as somewhat academic function. Good companions would be “Straight Man” by Richard Russo or “Foolscap” by Michael Malone (or see the “academic foibles” list on this page).