I think I’m done with Liane Moriarty. I had a lot of fun reading Big Little Lies, and Truly, Madly Guilty and I had fun reading this one, too. But it’s all the same book and the same reading experience: rich, white ladies encounter some soft tragedy and have their Tupperware selling businesses disrupted as a consequence. Okay, it’s not charitable (or accurate, I guess) to suggest the novels are pure fluff. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiction
The Husband’s Secret: Rich, white ladies have it so. hard. (not)
Filed under Bestseller, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction
The Hate U Give: Super. No clickbait. Just super.
I like to walk around the big chain bookstore, with its carefully crafted display tables and candles and blankets, and not buy books (or anything). Instead I have my library app open and as I see a book that looks interesting I order it up. A few weeks or months later the book arrives at the library and I feel this smug satisfaction of *free books* and the delight of having forgotten I’d ordered it in the first place, so it’s like a double present. Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Fiction, Young Adult Fiction
The Hours: Reading Deja Vu
I think I might have read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours before. I know I’ve seen the movie. And I’ve read Mrs. Dalloway a few times. So maybe that’s it. Or maybe the scenes of Mrs. Brown, at home, baking a cake, taking care of her kid, and wishing she was reading just echo my current life too closely? Continue reading
Filed under Book Club, British literature, Fiction, Prize Winner
The Monk of Mokha: Dave Eggers v Trump.
I’m on the record adoring Dave Eggers. As well as being routinely disappointed by his fiction (see Heroes, Your Fathers, The Circle, & Hologram). So it turns out I just really love his non-fiction, or quasi-fiction. I wrote a graduate paper on What is the What (which I just horrified myself by reading. I was tempted to post parts of it here because it is so earnest and sincere, but there is a limit to my exhibitionist tendencies – I see your shocked faces and I’m moving on). And my first encounter with Eggers was in his much discussed memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Zeitoun was also great. Really the point of this first paragraph is to prove I’ve read a lot of his books. High five, me. Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Fiction
Literary Vice 