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A Spot of Bother
by lz in Reading Archive on 27Jan2008
A decidedly British novel, as you can tell from the title. A whirlwind of family troubles besets George Hall, who has just retired and finds a lesion on his thigh, spinning his thoughts to cancer and causing panic attacks. His daughter Katie has announced an upcoming marriage to Ray, of...
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We've all been there-- you finish reading a book that saps your brain juices as you turn each page. For me, there was the accidental Candace Bushnell read. Virgil Griffith correlated "favorite books" from Facebook college networks with the corresponding average SAT score of those colleges to give you a...
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Sir Francis cobbles together his impressive tale of small craft circumnavigation of the globe in this book, relying on notes from his log and long ornery recollective tales that seemed to always follow this formula: "My leg hurts, yet I reset the sails 87 times today, repaired the self-steering mechanism,...
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A couple of weeks ago I checked out the National Book Circle panel on New & Unrecognized Voices and came away with several book recommendations. Unfortunately, these aren't at ye old biblioteca yet. Clane Hayward: Hypocrisy of Disco John Brandon: Arkansas Ismet Prcic The other bit of wisdom is that...
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Wanderer
by lz in Reading Archive on 20Jan2008
A bit seasick after reading this one nonstop for seven hours; my couch became the deck chair with cherubs on each side. On borrowed money and against legal threats, Hayden takes his four children and a crew on board the schooner Wanderer from Sausalito to Tahiti. Great story while the...
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Victory
by lz in Reading Archive on 16Jan2008
I was curious about the book Joan Didion claims to re-read everytime she begins a work of fiction, to remind herself of the possibilities. And my first exposure to Conrad was a good experience. The structure of the book was of interest - interweaving various time periods and points of...
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Top Picks of 2007
by lz in Top 10 Books on 08Jan2008
By request, for those extremely lazy folks out there who let me do their reading for them. Here are my top picks for last year (not that the books were published in 2007, but that I consumed them then). It's all about me, you see. The Winners 1. The Savage...
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After finishing this book, I've spent the last 30 minutes in stunned appreciative silence, sometimes clutching the book to my chest, sometimes re-reading the last page, letting a chill run through me again and again. I can't recall ever giving myself up so absolutely to a book. The History of...
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Just In Case
by lz in Reading Archive on 03Jan2008
As I was finishing this on the bus ride home tonight, I began to wonder, "How exactly does one wrap-up a teen-lit story? Will she dare to kill off the main character, or is it a happy ending out of necessity?" And luckily, Rosoff strikes just the right balance of...
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