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What I've been reading
"Ash" by Malinda Lo, a retelling of the Cinderella story. When Ash's mother, who is a believer in magic and may have consorted with fairies, dies, her father remarries and then also dies shortly afterward, leaving her with a cruel stepmother who forces her to be a lady's maid for her two daughters. Ash is torn between the love of a fairy prince who ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"A Gathering of Old Men" by Ernest J. Gaines. The book opens with a Cajun farmer dead, and a young white woman and an older black man both claiming to have done it. More and more older men from the sharecropping community in Louisiana show up claiming they did it, to the bafflement of the local sheriff. The white woman, Candy, and the old men are ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"Desert Solitaire" by Edward Abbey, considered a classic of nature writing, with spectacular pen and ink illustrations. Abbey was known as a novelist and nature writer, primarily with an emphasis on the American southwest. This book came from his experience as a park ranger in Utah's Arches National Monument park. I loved his rhapsodic prose about ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"Orlando" by Virginia Woolf. I'd seen the movie adaptation but had never read "Orlando." It's about as weird as you'd expect for a novel about a noble person who lives for 400 years and changes gender without explanation. It's more funny than you might expect, and explores themes of gender, changes in society and fashion, and what it means to be a ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"Ancillary Sword" by Ann Leckie, the second in her Imperial Radch trilogy. I'd heard from others that this was a little weak and felt like a bridge from the first to the third, but I still enjoyed it. In the second book, our main character, Breq, an AI who was once a ship with many "ancillary" bodies and now with only one, goes to the star system ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"The Dream Thieves," second in the Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater, as an audibook. The series follows Blue, the daughter of a psychic, who falls in with 4 private school boys -- called "Raven Boys" after the school's logo -- in their search for magic and a long-dead king who can grant a wish. The second book explores more of the boys' ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"The Buddha of Suburbia" by Hanif Kureishi. I knew this author primarily as a screenwriter and one of his films, "My Beautiful Laundrette," is one of my all-time favorite movies. "Buddha" is a semi-autobiographical novel about a teenager/young 20-something named Karim growing up as a mixed-race person (British mother, Indian father) in England, ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"Lock In" by John Scalzi. In the near future, a flu-like plague has swept the globe. Some people die from it, while others seem mostly unaffected. A small percentage experience full paralysis but unaffected mental function, resulting in "lock in," a condition called Haden's Syndrome. The world throws lots of money at research toward a cure and ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
"Bossypants" by Tina Fey, as an audiobook read by the author. Some actors and comedians are funny on film but can't write funny, but luckily that's not the case here. It helps that Tina reads her own book, and it's very funny. She talks about growing up as a theater kid, getting into standup, getting onto SNL and pitching "30 Rock." The title comes ( Read more... ) -
What I've been reading
This is the earliest in a given year that I've gotten to 50 books since I started tracking in 2006! I have a summer job that permits me to read when it's slow, and it's fairly typical for me to read 80-120 pages on a slow shift, and I'm also listening to more audiobooks this summer ( Read more... )