How could the Superfast Reader not be excited about this? Reading bloggers have been invited to read 5 classics in the months of January and February, courtesy of A Reader’s Journey. My five, culled from my BookMooch stack: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll The Railway Children by E. Nesbit The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins A Room with a View by EM Forster HT: The Sheila Variations
Synopsis: A suicidal teen is rescued by a charismatic drifter with designs on a woman he calls “The Princess.” Review: Gallowglass has not been my favorite Vine (the alter ego of crime writer Ruth Rendell), but subpar Vine is still head and shoulders above most of what’s out there in the mystery genre. Where Vine succeeds best in this book is in depicting Joe’s thralldom to Sandor, the man who rescued him from jumping front of a train. An orphan raised by loveless foster parents,…
Synopsis: A working mother of two finds her life teetering out of balance as she struggles to succeed in finance without feeling guilty that the nanny is raising her kids. Review: I sometimes have anxiety dreams where I’m working. I’m either behind the counter at the video store I clerked at in grad school, or posting things in Moveable Type for my work blog, or reenacting a specific job (like an event I’ve planned) in what feels like real time. While the dream is going…
Synopsis: Christine Vachon is an independent film producer, and in this book she tells the story of how she made films like Far From Heaven, Boys Don’t Cry, and more.
White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith Synopsis: 3 families–one Bengal, one white English/Jamaican, and the third white English–twist and turn throughout one another’s lives over the decades in and around a multicultural neighborhood in London. Review: Smith has a stellar knack for portraiture, with all of her characters being wholly unique, and capturing subtle aspects of character psychology in novel ways. My favorite has to be the long-suffering Alsana, mother to two twins as different as night and day. After her much-older husband Samad…
This post is going up in commemoration of the book I read for work last night and this morning. Check out the On Reading tag for more of the same. The book I read for work, while I won’t reveal the title or author because it hasn’t been published yet, had a really involved, contrived setup that forecasted everything that was going to happen in the plot, to the point where I was like, “Get on with it already, since I already know how this…