Book review
November 9, 2009
- BEST INTENTIONS, Emily Listfield.From the flap copy:After tossing and turning all night, thirty-nine-year-old Lisa Barkley wakes up well before her alarm sounds. With two daughters about to start another year at their elite Upper East Side private school and her own career hitting a wall, the effort of trying to stay afloat in that privileged world of six-story town houses and European jaunts has ...
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November 2, 2009
- KING OF THE SCREWUPS, K.L. Going. From the flap copy:Liam Geller is Mr. Popularity. Everybody loves him. He excels at sports; he knows exactly what clothes to wear; he always ends up with the most beautiful girls in school. But he's got an uncanny ability to screw up in the very ways that tick off his father the most.When his father finally throws him out of the house, his father's brother - ...
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November 1, 2009
- Butcher Bird: A Novel Of The Dominion by Richard_KadreyMy rating: 4 of 5 starsThe book started slowly and the characters' hipster snark grated on me enough that I might have put the book down except that it had come so highly recommended. The pace picked up the deeper in I went, to the point that it was hard to put the book down to go to the publisher's party Friday night.I'm told that Sandman ...
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October 26, 2009
- THE FAMILY MAN, Elinor Lipman. The flap copy:A hysterical phone call from his ex-wife and a familiar face in a photograph upend Henry Archer’s well-ordered life. They bring him back into contact with the child he adored, a short-term stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage long ago. Henry is a lawyer, an old-fashioned man, gay, successful, lonely. Thalia is now twenty-nine, an actress-hopeful, ...
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October 25, 2009
- These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul. In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can 'speak for' his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new ...
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October 25, 2009
- A man dies slowly and in great agony. He ponders the meaning of life, and this increases his anguish: even worse than the physical pain of a slow, lingering death is the spiritual anguish of realising he has wasted his life. Tolstoy's main target here is dishonesty and hypocrisy. This is established from the opening scene, when Ivan Ilyich's death is announced, and the reaction of his colleagues ...
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October 19, 2009
- LOVE IS THE HIGHER LAW, David Levithan. This quietly powerful YA novel, beginning with the events of 9/11 and focusing on the year after, takes its title from a line in the U2 song "One." The idea of "One" is symbolic here in terms of people coming together. Claire, Peter and Jasper, all New York teens, are barely acquaintances when the story opens, and they couldn't be more ...
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October 11, 2009
- I love the opening line of this book:"One could begin with the dust, the heat and the purple bougainvillea. One might even begin with the smell of rotting mangos tossed by the side of the road where the flies hummed and green-bellied lizards bobbed their orange heads while loitering in the sun. But why start there when Tayo walked in silence, oblivious to his surroundings." Sarah Ladipo ...
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October 10, 2009
- This book has very clear echoes of Proust, both in the writing style and in the sense of nostalgia that pervades the story of aristocratic decline. The references are clear and deliberate - in the very first chapter, Banville's narrator refers to his fragments of memory as "madeleines" and talks of his "search for time misplaced."None of this boded very well for the novel - I ...
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October 5, 2009
- NOTHING LIKE YOU, Lauren Strasnick. From the back cover:When Holly loses her virginity to Paul, a guy she barely knows, she assumes their encounter is a one-night stand. After all, Paul is too popular to even be speaking to Holly...and he happens to have a long-term girlfriend, Saskia. But ever since Holly's mom died six months ago, Holly has been numb to the world, and she's getting desperate to ...
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