Bought on a whim.
Really hilarious, irreverent, charming.
Bought on a whim.
Really hilarious, irreverent, charming.
Have looked at it in the bookstore a few times so picked it up when I saw it at the library the other day.
Three brothers, sister, insane mother all in different stages of romantic mess-ups sit shiva for their dad for a week and contretemps ensue.
Occasionally a bit crass but entertaining. Both funny and sad in parts, I liked the main character and I really loved Penny.
At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues. …
Penny’s honesty has always been like nudity in an action movie: gratuitous but no less welcome for it. …
You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.
A random library pickup.
Entertaining. Along the lines of “fantasy goes forensic”.
But I thought some of the transitions were choppy / and seemed to have some editing issues / a character would seem to be replying to something that wasn’t actually in the other character’s dialogue.
Bought:
date refers to date finished only; some books get started, and then set down for ages. i.e., just b/c I finished two books in a given day doesn’t mean I read two entire books that day!
By the author of the Sirantha Jax books, that’s why I picked it up. Didn’t like it as much. This is more a magical world rather than a sci fi world, so that may be part of it.
Also: product placement in a fantasy novel? REALLY jumped out at me. Bizarre. I guess I just don’t love this main character the way I love Sirantha.
The third book in the Sirantha Jax series. I really love this character and this world but I felt a little disjointed for the first bit. I guess I didn’t remember clearly enough what happened at the end of Book 2… And it’s going to suck when Book 4 comes out and I can’t go back and look at the end of this one again since I checked it out of the library! Oh woe is the unemployed student.
Love the action, love the world, love the Vel character. Really into this series.
Very cool sci fi that I picked up on a whim at the library. A little further ahead in a grimier version of our modern world, where the immigration problem has become “shifters”, people who take a mysterious drug called “slip” that slips or shifts them into other, parallel universes. Charles is one of the immigration officers involved. Lots of cool thoughts about identity and choices and time and linearity. Very cool!
I had read and really enjoyed Hustvedt’s intense novel “What I Loved” (if you search for “Hustvedt” on this page you can hear more) and although I am not a big reader of nonfiction, one day in the bookstore this just insisted on coming home with me.
These are really interesting essays. My favorites were the literary ones – ponderings on The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), The Bostonians (H. James) and Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) – and, as someone who was a New Yorker at the time, her essay on 9/11 from a NYer’s point of view.
The Minnesota stuff is all very familiar to me, I can picture those places not just from my own experiences in small towns there, and my undergrad experience at Gustavus (very similar to St. Olaf, where she went), but also from having been to many of the actual places.
She makes herself very vulnerable here. Way beyond anything I could ever commit to print. And at some points as similarly intense as in her fiction. Burning brightly.
Another fantastic duo, I would recommend these just as highly as the Kristin Cashore books, but note that they are very, very different.
The dystopian universe here is almost Dickensian in its shadings (although with fewer of the finer details) and it definitely makes you, the reader, long for escape for these characters, for survival, for even just the littlest bit of hope.
Unexpectedly cruel with odd kindnesses. And, as in much YA, some growing up and self discovery along the way.
An adventure of endurance… You’ll want to block off a day for these as you will find yourself unable to do anything else.
And if you’ve read the story “Wealth” in Margo Langan’s “White Time” collection, it almost seems like they come from the same world. In fact, I drove myself insane for an entire afternoon trying to figure out where that story was from as they felt so much of a piece.