“The Year of the Flood” isn’t really a sequel to “Oryx and Crake.” Instead, it tells the story of Toby and Ren, two members of the cult God’s Gardeners (GG), and how they have been able to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. It also, thankfully, fleshes out the two decades leading up to the cataclysmic plague from “Oryx and Crake” and manages to fill in the cracks from Snowman/Jimmy’s story. Toby came to the GG following the traumatic death of her parents, when she dropped […]
So much crying.
I was seeing this book everywhere but I had no idea what it was about. I think I kept confusing it with The Rosie Project, another book with a red cover and odd font, which I had already downloaded on my Kindle, so I kept ignoring Me Before You every time I came across it. Finally, whatever fog lives in my brain lifted for a few minutes and I realized, no, this is in fact a very different book. One that has recently been very […]
Mr. Wickham was so much worse than I ever imagined.
I’ve read Pride & Prejudice a handful of times, and am, in general, a big fan of Jane Austen (my personal favorite is Persuasion). And yes, I’ve fallen into the trap of reading prequels and sequels and spinoffs of varied quality. So I wasn’t in a huge hurry to read Longbourn. But I saw it at the library, and then remembered a CBR review from last year written by popcultureboy that convinced me to read it. And I’m so glad I did. Easily the best of the […]
The Joys of Motherhood
Oof. This book. This is the third of my ten African books this year, and my favorite so far. The chapters are short and poignant but flow together to paint a larger, brighter picture of traditional African society and one woman’s place in it. The characters live hard, determined lives. There’s a drastic distance between rural village and urban (Lagos, in this case.) It reminded me a bit of Things Fall Apart, since the story is told plainly, almost in the style of a folk […]