How strange to spend a whole novel waiting for the main character to die again… Every time Ursula Todd dies, “darkness falls” and she starts all over again, at her birth. She has vague memories of her previous lives, and is able to use these to avoid making the same mistakes again (for instance, although it takes a few tries, she saves her family from a flu epidemic that would have otherwise killed them all). It’s a really neat idea, but the novel itself varies from depressing […]
So now we’ve got the gang together…
How nice that my cannonball should hit on one of my all-time favorite books! After we finish chasing the man in black around the desert to the sea, The Drawing of the Three opens on Roland, passed out on a beach. He’s given a lovely wake up call by one of the greatest King monsters ever, the lobstrosities (whose persistent questioning was truly terrifying on audiobook — nice work), who tear off a couple of his fingers and his big toe. Roland is supposed to be seeking out his ka, […]
Musings on Manhood
Michael Chabon grew up in the 70s, a semi-practicing Jewish child of divorce, often picked on for being different in school. I’m about 20 years younger, lapsed Episcopalian, and while my parents don’t always seem to like each other very much, they raised my sister and I together behind a (mostly) united front. Like Chabon, I was (and am) wildly geeky, but I found “my people” at a young age and don’t have any real memories of being bullied or teased or anything like that. […]
Wish it had been quite a bit longer!
My love for Michael Chabon has been well documented on CBR. While I enjoyed this novella — my main complaint is its incredible brevity (which I know is the point of a novella, but still) — it definitely wasn’t one of my favorites of his. True, it’s skewed towards a younger audience, but so was Summerland and I loved that book so much that it made my husband jealous. “A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife’s lover, this you consider […]