Wow. I’ve been sitting here considering just copy-pasting “wow” two hundred and forty-nine times. I’d give this book six stars if I could. I think North Korea holds a fascination for many of us in the west. Certainly it does for me. I was eight when the Berlin Wall fell; old enough to know that something was happening, but too young to really grasp the significance. North Korea is the only closed country I’ve ever been aware of. Cuba is near enough and porous enough […]
Beautiful Stranger: Going Home with Moon Palace
I picked up Moon Palace on a whim while perusing a sale rack outside the door at Half-Price Books. Bookstores…. one of the few places where it’s still a good idea to go home with a stranger. In this case, an excellent idea. It’s hard for me to summarize the plot because this was such a great read, and I don’t want to spoil any discoveries along the way. Moon Palace is the memoir of Marco Stanley Fogg – known as “M.S.” or simply “Fogg.” […]
Lemondrop’s CBR #1: Holidays in Heck by P.J. O’Rourke
One of my goals with CBR is to read more fiction (I’m mostly a travel/history/how-to/humor girl), but I’ve been wanting to get to Holidays in Heck for so long that it would have been impossible to make a concerted effort to read anything else first. P.J. O’Rourke has been my favorite writer since I was too young to get most of the jokes. Books like Holidays in Hell – a collection of essays from O’Rourke’s days as Rolling Stone‘s foreign affairs desk chief – are […]