I was a little nervous to start MaddAddam, because while I quite like the first book of the series, Oryx and Crake, I didn’t love the second, Year of the Flood. So I was worried about how things would wrap up. Luckily, MaddAddam was fantastic — probably the best of the three. “The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they […]
Boy versus Monkey
I remember reading two books by Wilson Rawls in elementary school. One, of course, was Where the Red Fern Grows, which I vividly remember bawling over at the end. The second, Summer of Monkeys, has a much happier ending (and monkeys!) so I was happy to find it recently at a rummage sale and revisit the story, which I last read at least 20 years ago. “Papa,” I asked, “how can you help a wish?” “Oh, there are a lot of ways,” Papa said. “Hard work, faith, patience, […]
“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”
As in Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Krakauer starts with one case — in this book, the brutal murders of Brenda & Erica Lafferty — and expands from there to give the reader a full understanding of Mormonism, and its terrifying offshoot, the fundamental Mormons responsible for this violence and so much more. “As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than […]
A lovely romance — what Brooklyn should have been
I think part of my dislike for Brooklyn could be attributed to how much I liked Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I read/listened to the two over the same few days, and Helen Simonson’s did such a great job with the gentle romance in this novel — set in modern times but with decidedly “old fashioned” characters — that it I think it made me dislike Eilis even more. “But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?” “My […]