This link opens in a pop-up window
TW : Suicidal thoughts & actions
A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world …
Fluff. A pleasant, and predictable, read, in which everything turns out well in the end. Ove is a type - the strong man who doesn't want to talk about his feelings, and is more at home with a screwdriver than with people. And one that we all know, in our family or friends.
An intriguing book. Very heavily researched, with possibly too many details. (Do I really need to know which nights Isabella spent in which manors, and how much each item that she bought cost?) On the other hand, it was filled with assumptions and speculations, telling what Isabella 'must have' felt, and stating that her tyrannies after Edward II was deposed were obvious proof of her infatuation with Mortimer. But the kicker comes when she convinces herself that Edward was not murdered, but escaped to Europe and lived as a penitent hermit for the rest of his days - even to returning to England to meet with his son. She quoted a great deal of source material, not in the original French or Norman French or Latin, of course, but translated into English. But sometimes it was rendered in modern English, and sometimes in what sounded like Elizabethan English. This was …
An intriguing book. Very heavily researched, with possibly too many details. (Do I really need to know which nights Isabella spent in which manors, and how much each item that she bought cost?) On the other hand, it was filled with assumptions and speculations, telling what Isabella 'must have' felt, and stating that her tyrannies after Edward II was deposed were obvious proof of her infatuation with Mortimer. But the kicker comes when she convinces herself that Edward was not murdered, but escaped to Europe and lived as a penitent hermit for the rest of his days - even to returning to England to meet with his son. She quoted a great deal of source material, not in the original French or Norman French or Latin, of course, but translated into English. But sometimes it was rendered in modern English, and sometimes in what sounded like Elizabethan English. This was a bit disconcerting.
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot launches readers on an adventure into a not-so-distant future where man and machine , struggle to …
Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by "The Dean of Western Writers", Wallace …
An interesting novel. In which there is hardly any plot, and just a wee bit of overblown conflict. So it's basically a novel-length character study.
But what a study. The characters were so finely drawn that we all recognized them. In ourselves, our spouses, our parents and our friends. We spent the evening talking about couple dynamics and gender roles, and even the interplay between friends.
As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack …
This book was difficult to read. Repetitive and verging on strident. And sometimes it was hard to tell whether she was stating facts or opinions. One of us did some research and found some rebuttals to the book that claimed that her statistics were off - that nearly everyone in prison was convicted of crimes of violence. None of which detracts from the fact (opinion?) that the war on drugs has been a colossal failure, or excuses the fact that enforcement is focused so strongly on minorities, and largely ignoring drug use by whites.
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young …
A textbook on ancient Greek for high-school students. With only the first half of the class. And it still took me nearly a year to finish.
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals …
A short book, but not an easy one. Purportedly written to his 15-year old son, possibly as a hard-copy version of the talk that every black male teenager gets. But published. Which raises the question of who exactly is the book's intended audience. I felt like a voyeur reading it. The structure of the book is loose, more stream of consciousness than anything else. And the vocabulary is hard to follow, with "people who think they are white" turning into "Dreamers" by the end of the book.
Cora não consegue imaginar o mundo que há além da fazenda de algodão ― e nem poderia. Das poucas coisas …
Traveling back in time, from Oxford circa 2060 into the thick of World War II, was a routine excursion for …
When a time-travel lab suddenly cancels assignments for no apparent reason and switches around everyone's schedules, time-traveling historians Michael, Merope, …
A history of poor whites in America, mainly in the South.
Nobody liked this book. It was overly long and repetitive, badly in need of a good editor. It flipped between a factual historical account and standing on a soapbox spouting unsubstantiated opinions. It presented a scathing picture of a long-term underclass in this 'classless' society, but gave not a hint of how to solve the problem.
But.
It triggered so much discussion that the librarian had co come in and kick us out so they could close up.
"In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds …
A novel, with a strong female protagonist, loosely based on Russian fairy tales. A couple of people had gone to see the author at a talk in the burbs, and said that she'd written it because she was bored. And had written too much and had taken the first third of her manuscript and rewritten that as the first novel of a trilogy.
