My book club chose Nine Women, One Dress (2016) by Jane L. Rosen as our latest book. It looked like a short and easy read, and I was hopeful that I would enjoy it. You can probably get a good guess at the plot from the title. There is one little, black dress of the season that significantly affects nine women’s lives. Some of the stories were entertaining, and Rosen did a good job of weaving the dress through her characters’ lives. I really enjoyed the beginning […]
[BINGO #2!] In this most holy month of guerrilla bargain shopping which begins with the Happy Holiday season of Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, I couldn’t think of a better book to review than Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Both Roxanne Gay and George Saunders are singing the praises of this fresh young author, and everyone should be reading this outstanding collection of short stories. Adjei-Brenyah’s tales whipsaw between dystopian near futures of shopping madness in “Friday Black,” where stores just pile up the dead bodies so […]
So I picked Calypso by David Sedaris as my “Brain Candy” square for CBR10 Bingo, which after reading it, seems like maybe not the best choice, because these short stories are a bit darker than usual. Sedaris’ sister Tiffany committed suicide in 2013, and this, his mother’s alcoholism, and a strange tumour growing on his side become the running topics in many of the stories in his first compilation in five years. Calypso is still hilariously funny, in exactly the ways you expect it to be. I’ve always had […]
For my “This Old Thing” square I finally bit the bullet and took this binding of two plays with me to jury duty to ensure I wouldn’t be tempted by more modern works, and shut my phone off. I needn’t have worried; it’s not like this would get mistaken for a written transcript of This Week Tonight or anything, but Moliere is not just remarkably readable, his views aren’t as antiquated as you might expect for someone writing in the mid 1600s. I picked these […]
