A real post.modern classic, with its essays on Victorian life, and alternative endings. I eagerly read it through the first time, and the rereading — for the book group — was certainly not wasted. Well-written, living characters, events interesting and those essays, they just give more life to the story. At least to this reader.
Nine longish short stories, starting with the amazing Hugo-winner ‘The Faery Handbag’, filled with sense of wonder, or a sense of everyday life, slightly different. At least at the start. And filled with great characters, in cat skin or not, stuff sometimes nightmares are made of, sometimes not. A clichéd review, perhaps, but […]
A French classic, yes, but somehow it doesn’t seem to catch me, speak to me. Maybe because it’s been too long since I was a teenager. (This is supposed to be a growing up story.) Or maybe because the life these characters have doesn’t touch mine. Or I find their motivations too strange to me […]
I would prefer not to forget Bartleby, that very curious character brought to us by Herman Melville, but I won’t be forgetting this book either. Marcelo, a Catalan clerk, who has managed to publish a book, has become a Bartleby, not able to write anything He sets out to find other Bartlebys, and reasons why […]
To put it simply, Fannie Flagg entertains me, makes me laugh. Aloud, too. And some days, we all need to laugh, need to be entertained. Her main character, Elner Shimfissle dies, and gets to heaven, but is returned, from the looks of it, to make some things right. And affects the whole […]
It is hard to entertain, and, at the same time, talk about things that matter. Like life .. and things like science, and have people in the text lead lives that sound possible, quite normal. Robert J. Sawyer manages to do that, to me at least. It’s refreshing to read a book, in which, in […]
What if – human beings just (POOF!) disappeared tomorrow? What would happen to earth, how would the disappearance affects its flora and fauna, how long would it take all traces of humankind to disappear, too? Are there any lasting mementoes, until the sun becomes a bit bigger than now, that is. It may be that […]
At first I thought this was about the orphans, the two Korean girls arriving in the U.S.A., and thei life there. Yes, it’s that, partly. But it’s about belonning, it’s about the life experience, it’s about family. It’s about being human. And it’s among the best Tyler has ever written.
A thick book on a very hard subject. Zimbardo led the infamous experiment in Stanford University, where students played guards and prisoners so thoroughly that the experiment had to be stopped – not by Lombardy himself, he’d become too involved in it, but an outsider, who saw from her outside point of view the damage […]
Only another book lover will understand the feelings this book will evoke. A beautiful story of growing up as one, and of the bookshops feeding the love of books — and bookshops. It also makes the reader think about their own book addictions and its start. A bookaholic will almost drown in it, the […]