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A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve …
A 'memoir', of a middle-aged woman in the 60's remembering her youth. Specifically, the people and events in the year of 1938 that set the course of her adult life. Not much in the way of a plot, but the characters were well drawn, and the writing superb.
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the …
In a nutshell: Density is good. Sprawl is bad.
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of …
Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes …
It reads like an extended fairy tale rather than a novel, with stock characters - the simple farmer, the dutiful wife, the spendthrift son. The plot revolves like Fortune's wheel, through good harvests and poor ones, starvation and immeasurable wealth. But always, always returning to the land.
An incomplete Roman novel believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. What remains …
The book is so chewed up that it's difficult to pin it down. Mayhap it's a satire (in the modern sense of the word). But unfortunately (or rather fortunately) we're so far removed from Nero's Rome that we have no knowledge of what's being parodied and so don't see the humor. Was Trimalchio supposed to be a parody of Nero himself? That would be sailing mighty close to the wind.
But perhaps the satire is timeless. For we all have seen far too much of people very like Trimalchio.
Maybe it's a moral tale, telling us to avoid ostentation and to not think about sex every minute of the day.
I was at a concert of Renaissance music last week, and picked up the program to read through the translations. And glanced over to the left, where the original Latin text was printed. And realized that I could read it. I. Can. Read. Latin. Now. Awesome!
The Story of an African Farm (published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron) was …
The first third focused on the childhoods of the three main characters. I think that it was supposed to be funny. But this humor consisted mostly of showing how adults are cruel, gullible and hypocritical. Repeated ad nauseum.
The middle third was an essay on childhood, and the changes that occur as a child grows up. Specifically, how they embrace religion when their minds are not yet fully formed and rejected when they are old enough to think logically. A bit dated, but interesting.
The final third follows the children after they've grown to adulthood. Drama, betrayal, and gobs of hormones flying loose. A bit of odd cross-dressing, and a long proto-feminist screed. Which rubbed me wrong. Mostly because it strikes me that anyone who championed equal rights for women should have extended that hope to people with dark complexions. And in this book such people are portrayed as mentally …
The first third focused on the childhoods of the three main characters. I think that it was supposed to be funny. But this humor consisted mostly of showing how adults are cruel, gullible and hypocritical. Repeated ad nauseum.
The middle third was an essay on childhood, and the changes that occur as a child grows up. Specifically, how they embrace religion when their minds are not yet fully formed and rejected when they are old enough to think logically. A bit dated, but interesting.
The final third follows the children after they've grown to adulthood. Drama, betrayal, and gobs of hormones flying loose. A bit of odd cross-dressing, and a long proto-feminist screed. Which rubbed me wrong. Mostly because it strikes me that anyone who championed equal rights for women should have extended that hope to people with dark complexions. And in this book such people are portrayed as mentally inferior and subhuman - hardly better than part of landscape. The others assured me that Schreiner wasn't racist. I'll have to accept that she tucked those bits into the book only because she didn't want to upset the Victorian apple cart more than she was already doing.
A sweet little love story. The author was aiming for a retelling of Othello, but sort of missed. Instead of a tragedy, she ended up with a fairy tale, in which people fall in love in a flash and everyone is just too perfect. And which is mirrored by the fable dribbled out by Sirine's uncle through the course of the book.
The writing was lovely. Food as a metaphor for, well, just about everything.
Elizabeth Kolbert: The sixth extinction (AudiobookFormat, 2014, Simon & Schuster Audio)
From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, …
E. Lockhart, Ariadne Meyers: We Were Liars (2014, Listening Library)
A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four …
A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long …
The Freakonomics of math—a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world …
Clear, explaining math without a morass of equations. And, in places, laugh-out-loud funny. Whether that's a sign of his skill or my own geekiness, well, let's leave that as an exercise for the reader.
When Deborah Knott's terminally ill aunt, Rachel, is found smothered to death in her bed at a hospice center, all …
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and …
