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Category Archives: Book Reviews
A Wrinkle In Time / Madeleine L’Engle
17 August 2008 – 12:07 am
Quick note: I won’t be doing a Free Books roundup for 17 August. Didn’t have time today.
I’m not sure exactly when I first read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. Even though I purchased this paperback copy in 1999, I’m pretty sure I didn’t re-read it when I bought it or after, until today. Very quickly, it all came back. But it didn’t hold up as well as I thought it would. (…)
American Wife / Curtis Sittenfeld
16 August 2008 – 2:05 am
Random House provided the ARC of American Wife I read for this review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. In return, I agreed to write a review of at least 25 words to be posted on LibraryThing.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s new book American Wife has certainly received a lot of buzz, and it’s not even officially out until 2 September. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. It’s a thinly disguised ripped from the headlines take on the life of Laura Bush. (…)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves / Lynne Truss
5 August 2008 – 1:23 pm
I have a number of friends who would easily fall into the category of grammar thumpers (think Bible-thumpers). Like the folks who come calling at your doorstep trying to convince you that your current path leads straight to hell, grammar thumpers bemoan the inevitable fall of civilization indicated by the inappropriate use of apostrophes. Lynne Truss is one of those people.
I am not. (…)
China Mountain Zhang / Maureen F. McHugh (The Sunday Salon)
3 August 2008 – 2:11 pm
For today’s Sunday reading I finished off Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. Written in the early 1990s, it’s just a look a hundred or so years into the future. Not cyberpunk or nanotech or space opera. I didn’t think it was all that revolutionary a story, but I’m also reading it 15 years after it was first published.
China Mountain Zhang is an engineering technition living in New York. He passes for Chinese, when China is the dominant force on Earth. (…)
Farthing / Jo Walton
31 July 2008 – 10:21 am
In the mystery genre, I generally lean toward police procedurals or hard-boiled crime fiction. I’m not so much a fan of cozies. But I do quite like this cozy. And that’s even with another strike against it as far as my tastes go. I generally don’t like books about British stiffs, particularly blue bloods. My eyes glaze over whenever the subject turns to English nobility. I actually have a similar reaction to the antebellum South as well. But, as I said, I liked this book. (…)
A Case of Two Cities / Qiu Xiaolong (The Sunday Salon)
27 July 2008 – 3:47 pm
It’s been a month or so since I’ve gotten any Sunday Salon reading in, what with trips to Seattle for Independence Day and my birthday and other distractions. Today was a lazy day on the couch, sipping tea and reading Qiu Xiaolong’s A Case of Two Cities. Unfortunately this has not been an enjoyable read.
My memories, somewhat faded, of the first books in the Inspector Chen series were of solid mystery writing set in a different culture. (…)
Sounder / William H. Armstrong
22 July 2008 – 8:39 pm
A quick review of a young adult book, Sounder. I can’t recall if I actually read this growing up or not. I read a lot of the Newbery Award books in my youth, but I got no sense of deja vu as I read this, so perhaps I didn’t.
The story is that of a young black boy, the son of a sharecropper in the south. His family lives in a small shack with him, his parents, two siblings, and Sounder their redbone hound/bulldog mix. (…)
Set This House In Order / Matt Ruff
22 July 2008 – 10:27 am
Set This House In Order is an awesome book! I’m not really sure how I acquired it though. After I picked up Ruff’s Bad Monkeys I realized I had this earlier book by him on my shelves. I think I avoided reading it because the cover just screams pretentious literary fiction to me. But it’s not! It’s charmingly sweet and engaging.
I have a fascination with mentally ill people. I want to know what it’s like to lose your mind. (…)
The Bourne Identity / Robert Ludlum
18 July 2008 – 2:00 am
I’ve not read a lot of thrillers over the years, but I really enjoy the thriller movie. You don’t expect a lot of plot consistency, but there are usually lots of guns, explosions, kick-ass fights, and eye candy galore. I figured I would get all of that in The Bourne Identity, minus the obvious visual aspect of the eye candy. I was right.
A man wakes up under a doctor’s care in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast. (…)
Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice: 4th Edition / Charles E. Bressler
12 July 2008 – 6:46 pm
If you’ve been reading this blog of reviews for a while, you’ll have realized that I am hardly an academic reviewer. I do not have any kind of formal training in reviewing or criticism, nor any in writing for that matter. I read a lot. I’ve taken the standard literature and creative writing classes that are required in a U.S. education, but nothing more. Now, I’m a bit of a snob. I do believe I got more out of these classes than many others. (…)
