God on the Rocks – 3/5 Stars https://www.amazon.com/God-Rocks-Jane-Gardam/dp/1933372761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512942968&sr=8-1&keywords=god+on+the+rocks Jane Gardam is most well known in contemporary circles for her novel Old Filth, which is a kind of running joke on “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” and so that novel has a final moments of the British Empire in closing feel to it. This novel is an earlier one, from 1978, and takes places during the war. It has a 1970s politics feel to it alongside the feel of the time period in which it’s set. […]
Weird mix of weird
Across Five Aprils: 4/ 5 Stars This is another Civil War book, and another Civil War book taking place in the midwest, that I read as a kid. I grew up in the South and thought about the Civil War a LOT. It happens. Anyway, like Rifles for Watie mentioned in the previous one, this focuses on the western theater of the war but still deals a lot with the news from the East. This becomes a kind of interesting conceit, where our main character […]
Tom Ripley, no relation to Ellen Ripley
In this sequel to the first novel The Talented Mr. Ripley we find Tom Ripley still living off those checks from Dickie Greenleaf, now married, and embroiled in an art forgery scandal. What’s always funny to me about criminals is that too often, while there’s money to be made and all that, the amount of work required in order to make their enterprises work is equal to or greater than the return on investment of their enterprises. So the lengths that Tom Ripley must go to […]
Oh? Friend?
When Harry Potter 7 came out in bookstores, my brother, his wife, and I all went to the midnight release and bought three copies. We each spent the next few days reading it the same room at individual paces. Someone made a joke about a line where Harry and Ron are talking about their wands. And we sort of made out of context jokes like that for the next 3 days. This book had the same effect on me, except I definitely think this time […]