“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.” Jingo is an anti-war book in […]
Laughing at Race in America
I’ve beensitting on this review for a couple of weeks, struggling to know what to write. The book won the Man Booker prize, which often means a challenging read. After reading the book I watched an interview of Beatty to get a sense of what he was like. He was charming, yet deflecting. I read another interview and found that he truly focuses on the craft of writing. He’s not prolific. But the attention to every word is evident in The Sellout. The book begins […]
Connie Willis is OBSESSED with communication.
I really, really ended up enjoying this, but it was touch and go there for a bit. Connie Willis’s writing always has this distinct, relentless tone to it, and it gets under your skin until you see where it’s going. I’ve had that same experience with all the books I’ve read by her, although the tone takes a different specific tenor every time. In Doomsday Book it was the tedium of death. In To Say Nothing of the Dog it was the farcical nature of […]
No, not as good as ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette,’ but still good!
This was a solid three star book for the first half, but it had me by the end. It’s probably unfair to judge this book so heavily in comparison with another, as if it’s not its own thing, but it’s inescapable for me. Like many people, I absolutely fell in love with Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, when I read it back in 2012. My love was perhaps stronger because the book came out of nowhere. I hadn’t been planning to read it, […]