It’s the Cannonball Read 10 Holiday Book Exchange! I didn’t get ANY books reviewed this year (and because of stupid “1Q84,” I also didn’t quite meet my reading goal this year… I’ll probably only get to 49/52), but I love this community and still played the book exchange game! And guess what? I WON!(J/K… we all won.) My amazing Santa, CoffeeShopReader got me the best gift, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which, like, is even better because my Santa last year got me the sequel and […]
The snoring, the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread.
I feel incredibly robbed not to have found this book when I was mid-adolescence, when I would have reveled in empathy with Esperanza, the beautiful, awkward, sad, scared, bold, shy, lonely, social narrator who is coming-of-age through the course of the year during which The House on Mango Street takes place. Cisneros writes this book as an extended series of short vignettes: portraits of people, places, and things in Esperanza’s life; all the things that make up the tapestry of her youth. With these vignettes, […]
We were just at the point of approaching and negotiating a gentle curve.
Well, this was a lovely discovery! Kitchen was in a stack of books given to me very randomly by a friend who moved away a couple of years ago and did a big purge. She has great taste, but also loves to buy books, so I’m finding it all a little hit and miss. I wish I had picked this up the day my friend gave it to me. It is incredibly, beautifully written, so also I must give due credit to the translator, because […]
What if she doesn’t want to remember?
You know how sometimes you keep trying to read a book, but you aren’t feeling it so you put it down indefinitely and then when you pick it up again, you can’t believe how much action there is and you just plow through the end as if you’d never put it down? Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God was like that for it. It’s the first book I started reading in 2017, and one of the last that I finished. I don’t think I read a […]