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
The Hate U Give: Super. No clickbait. Just super.
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
Home Fire: I was once boss of Greek mythology.
Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is great. It’s a contemporary retelling of Antigone, which for those of you not up on your Greek mythology is told in the Sophocles play by the same name and is about a bunch of battles and Antigone – sister, daughter, all round righteous lady – defying the king’s order by insisting the her brother’s dead body be buried. A bunch of spoilers follow, so if you’re going to read it (and you should) you might want to stop reading here. Continue reading
Filed under Booker Prize, British literature, Fiction
Literary Vice 