Normally, I’m not into guys like Jamie Hyneman, but I’m sure falling for him in this cover photo. Here’s my review.
Almost Good
To be fair this is not a bad book, it just annoyed the sweet bejesus out of me! Almost English, is Mendelson’s fourth novel, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize last year and it is really difficult to see why! Ostensibly it tells the story of Marina Farkas, “a 16-year-old who has recently swapped Bayswater for Dorset, and Ealing Girls’ for Combe Abbey, a boarding school replete with every single ancient ritual and socially aspirational accoutrement that its paying customers might demand.” Now surrounded by […]
In Which I Address My Intellectual Vulgarity
As someone who has been reading romance novels virtually non-stop for two years, I have a lot of feelings on the subject. As a successful writer in the genre, Maya Rodale has feelings and actual research on the subject. I purchased her thesis, Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained, because I wanted to understand why this mass market genre is so consistently derided not only by readers, but also seemingly by the book industry as well. Many people read these books […]
Americanah
Last year I read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is a brilliant fictionalized portrayal of Nigeria before and during the civil war, and was blown away by both the story and her writing. Once I heard she had this new book out, I put myself on the 70-person wait list for Americanah and finally picked it up last Friday. Americanah is about a young woman named Ifemelu who grows up in Nigeria and due to the multiple strikes at her […]