Book 1: Re: Colonized Planet 5 – Shikasta. Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor [George Sherban] Emissary Grade 9, 87th of the Period of the Last Days This is the first of five “space fiction” novels that Doris Lessing wrote in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and finally in the early 1990s. I call it “space fiction” because she calls it “space fiction” in the opening “Some Remarks” of the collection. They were published separately and then together, and then went out […]
Weekender Edition
Started Early, Took the Dog – 4/5 Stars Not the best of the bunch, but a good one to end on. Kate Atkinson feels like she’s setting herself up to write the best writing of her career. This is a good novel, and it’s still better than the first of the series. For those of you who know about these books, they are “mysteries” in the sense that a mystery happens, and as happens with the others, Jackson Brodie, her detective kind of mostly accidentally […]
Too many notebooks.
There are some books that do really well as audiobooks, particularly if you have a long commute or need something that will engage your attention. There are others that have long, slow, winding threads of story and just don’t grab your attention the way they should when you are exhausted and stuck in rush-hour traffic. The Golden Notebook is a really difficult, dense book, and it does not a good audiobook make. Anna Wulf is a conflicted writer. After publishing one highly successful novel, Frontiers […]
Why should a woman be more like a man?
The Greeks knew that the mask in the theater was not a disguise but a means of revelation. This is a mind blowing novel about a woman who decides to have three men exhibit her art as their own creations as part of a larger art project she calls “Maskings.” Our protagonist Harriet “Harry” Burden wants to expose how perceptions influence the way the public views art. She believes that, had she shown her works as herself, as artist Harriet Burden, she would have been […]