226 reviews found
Showing 81 to 100 of 226 results
I’m enjoying my re-read of the Temeraire series, as I work to get caught up to the most recent volumes. It’s interesting to see how my opinions have changed since my first reading. As with the previous book, Throne of Jade, I have reduced my rating for Black Powder War. Maybe I’ve grown harsher in my old age. Maybe I was just caught up in enthusiasm for dragons the first time I read…
This is the third in a trilogy of historical fiction I’ve been reading. And by “trilogy” I mean “three historical fiction books I borrowed at the same time from the library but otherwise they have no relation to each other, and one is The Serpent of Venice so techically it’s not historical fiction, just madness”. It hasn’t been the most satisfying experience. The slightly ahistorical The Serpent of Venice was definitely the best of the…
I thought that, having actually visited Amsterdam, I would get more from The Miniaturist. I would enjoy Jessie Burton’s descriptions of Amsterdam scenery as it would have been in the seventeenth century—and while most of Amsterdam has modernized, this is set within the old part of the city which has retained a lot of its historical elements. But that’s not what happened. I was disappointed by how little description Burton puts into the…
Guys, Pocket is back!
I heard about this book ages ago, then promptly forgot it existed, and rediscovered it at my library. (Libraries are awesome that way.) My first reaction was, “Ooh, a Christopher Moore novel I haven’t read.” My second reaction was, “Bloody hell, it’s a semi-sequel to Fool!” (No English accent though. Two years in England and I still can’t do a decent English accent. sigh)
Fool was the first Christopher…
I started re-reading the entire Temeraire series recently. I didn’t post a new review of His Majesty’s Dragon, because I felt my original review said everything that needed to be said. Throne of Jade, however, has been lingering on my to-reread shelf for years, a somewhat hyperbolic five stars attached to it, no explanation. So it’s only fair I give it a review it deserves. Yes, I’ve downgraded it to a satisfactory three stars.…
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a kind of bildungsroman for an anti-hero. We first meet Duddy through his Scottish history teacher, the tired and broken Mr. MacPherson, who earns Duddy’s enmity when he insults Duddy’s father and quickly finds out that he has crossed the wrong boy. From the first, Mordecai Richler establishes that Duddy is a bully and prone to holding a grudge. Indeed, Duddy’s long memory figures prominently in a novel that…
This was the (viewer-selected!) December book for the Banging Book Club. I read this over two years ago (God, where does the time go?) but decided to re-read it. I do not regret this decision. It’s even better than I remember.
I’m actually pretty happy with my review below, and it is long, so I won’t add much. But as much as this book is about sex…
During my time in England, I have consumed an extraordinary number of BBC documentaries (and the occasional drama) about Britain’s long, bloody, occasionally confused history. Some of these covered the Plantagenets, but the lion’s share tend to drift decidedly towards the Tudors. Even the brutal episodes of internecine family bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses have nothing on slow-motion car crash that is Henry VIII’s six wives, Reformation, and Elizabethan England. In The Marriage…
Having not grown up during a time with segregation, it’s difficult for me to understand completely what such a society is like. But stories like Wakulla Springs at least help by highlighting some of the less overt but no less harmful racist and oppressive tactics used in the United States to maintain the social status quo. In this eponymous Florida town, Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages allow their characters to dream—and then sacrifice those dreams…
I actually read this back when Subterranean Press first published it online. I almost didn’t re-read it when I found it in the Hugo Voters Packet … but then I decided that I wanted to write a review of it, and I wanted to refresh my memory. I’m glad I did this, because “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” is even better than I remember. (I am aware of the irony of this…
This is not an easy story for me to love, and maybe even like is not the appropriate word. I can appreciate it, as literature. That being said, unlike much of the so-called “great” or “classic” literature I have read to date, I do not feel immeasurably enriched by Things Fall Apart. Although at times moving and disturbing, Chinua Achebe’s account of how Europeans stripped Nigeria of its cultural and tribal identity lacks a…
In Grade 12 English we were responsible for an Independent Study Unit, where we read two novels and wrote an essay comparing their common themes. We also had to give a presentation on a theme from the books. I studied Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! and Girlfriend in a Coma; my presentation was on theodicy and the Problem of Evil. A classmate gave a presentation about Pride and Prejudice. We had the opportunity to…
Thrilled by the excellent recent adaptation by the BBC, I decided it was time to finally read The Three Musketeers. I have vague memories of borrowing a book with a yellow hardback cover from the library when I was much, much younger. But at that precocious age I found the nineteenth century language and over-the-top tropes of romance and revenge difficult to enjoy, and I don’t recall if I ever finished it. This time,…
Lee Collins has gone and done it, people. He has made me a fan of a Western-based series. I never thought I would see the day. But if I liked The Dead of Winter, then I guess I loved She Returns from War. This sequel is everything I wanted and nothing like what I expected; Collins manages to satisfy my appetite while simultaneously surprise and delight.
Whereas The Dead of Winter is a…
I'm a sucker for books set in ancient Rome, and in particular, mysteries. So I've been anticipating Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls, because it promises to deliver exactly what I like: the delicious, twisted knot of a murder set as microcosm against the larger intrigue of the corrupt Roman empire. R.S. Downie doesn't disappoint.
Ruso is an officer in the Twentieth Legion, which is stationed in Roman Britain--in other words, the middle of…
I saw this on a library shelf and fell prey to their assertion that, having read The Shadow of the Wind, I should read this too. Blair’s review is spot-on when she says “the story begins promisingly” but then “the book soon begins to get quite silly and more and more plot holes and unanswered questions pop up”. The Prince of Mist suffers from being, ultimately, a story without a heart. Carlos Ruiz Zafón…
The cover of this edition boldly proclaims, “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.” This quotation is from fairly early in Catch-22, yet I understand what it was chosen as representative of the book as a whole. The novel’s title has become synonymous with an absurd, recursive paradox—because that’s exactly what Joseph Heller depicts in this satirical World War II story.
When I was younger, Catch-22 defeated me, in that…
Yes, I have indeed read another romance novel with vampires. What is wrong with me?
As with The Rest Falls Away, Soulless has been on my to-read list for a while now. I almost bought the boxed set of all five books in this series at Christmas time, stopping myself on the grounds that I wouldn’t want to bring them back to England with me, so they’d gather dust at home until the summer.…
Kate Mosse has been on the periphery of my literary radar for a while now. Hers were books that would show up on recommendation lists based on books I had like. They would appear at my friends’ houses, imposing yet reassuring with their bulk and sleek, simple cover art. I was vaguely aware that she wrote historical fiction, and that was it.
Citadel confronted me from the stack of just-returned books at the library one…
I didn’t expect to be reading another one after the last one, but I guess what they say about vampire romance novels is true: it never rains but it pours.
Actually, The Rest Falls Away has been on my to-read list since 2009, long before Dracula, My Love waltzed its way into my life. The tagline everyone uses to describe this book is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Regency England”, and I’m unoriginally…
Showing 81 to 100 of 226 results