2014 Book #34: The Cleanest Race – and a couple additions to the Fail Pile
North Korea fascinates me. The culture is so vastly different than my own, and it’s so secretive, that I’m intrigued. I saw The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters on Oyster, and it sounded really interesting. I’d just finished Butcher’s Crossing and had no idea where to go next, so I thought […]
2014 Book #22: A Tale Dark and Grimm
I’m really disappointed that I didn’t like A Tale Dark and Grimm. It’s a retelling of various Grimm’s Fairy Tales for kids with lots of the gore left in. I’ve read some brilliant kids’ books in the past few months, and I was expecting something similar. That’s not what I got. Adam Gidwitz‘s writing lacks the […]
2013 Book #45: Damned
Damned isn’t my first brush with Palahniuk: I tried to read Haunted a few years ago, and I read Lullaby and blogged about it in 2011. He’s most famous for Fight Club, but that’s Not My Kind of Thing. I’ve seen snippets of the movie. I didn’t remember much about Lullaby, except that I generally liked it, but on […]
2013 Book #41: Anna Karenina
I don’t even really want to talk about this one. I read it; isn’t that enough? I know that Anna Karenina is considered one of the best novels ever written and that I should like it, but I just didn’t. I got bored really quickly, and it’s just too damn long. And it’s false advertising, which makes me angry, […]
2013 Book #39: The Book Thief
I read The Book Thief because I felt like I had to: there’s a movie coming out that I thought I might like to see, and it’s all over Tumblr. I was convinced that I’d hate it for being sappy and preachy, but I started reading it, and my opinion slowly changed. I decided to give it […]
2012 Book #7: The Optimist’s Daughter
Eudora Welty has long been a staple of my Too Sentimental category. I don’t think I’ve read anything of hers since I was in high school, and I don’t even remember what it was. She reappeared on my radar after my fairly recent success with novelists like George Eliot and Willa Cather. I really read […]
2011 Book #48: The Sense of an Ending
The Christmas Crunch continues, in which I readandreadandread to reach my fifty-book goal before the year is out. Which means I’m limited to short novels for the moment. At a lean 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending definitely qualifies. It’s actually been on my to-read pile since it came out earlier this year. I […]
2011 Book #35: Lullaby
Lullaby is the second Chuck Palahniuk novel I’ve attempted and the first I’ve finished. I picked up Haunted a couple of years ago, and, though I remember liking it well enough, I didn’t finish it. It either freaked me out or bored me. I’m not sure which. I read Lullaby because Jacob told me about […]
2011 Book #21: The Year of the Flood
The Year of the Flood isn’t really a sequel to Oryx and Crake like I expected it to be. The two novels’ events happen at the same time: the plots and characters are interwoven. The Year of the Flood is narrated by two of these characters, Toby and Ren. They’re both part of an environmentalist […]
2011 Book #14: Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee has been following me around. I hadn’t heard of him until relatively recently, and then his name started popping up everywhere. Book-related everywheres, anyway. So when I happened to pick up Disgrace and read the blurb, I decided to give it a try, recalling how much I’ve liked South African lit in the […]