Filed under: Uncategorized
It has been 222 days since my last post: I’ve got a new job, a new hair color, a new outlook on life, and will shortly be moving to a new city. I’ve definitely fallen off of the book radar so imagine my surprise while scanning the BBC’s website that it was already that time of year: the Man Booker Prize long list announcement. The Man Booker long list consistently promises phenomenal fiction reads from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth and each year I find a new favorite from this list; last year it was Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole. The 2009 long list is:
- AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book
- JM Coetzee’s Summertime
- Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze
- Sarah Hall’s How to Paint a Dead Man
- Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness
- James Lever’s Me Cheeta
- Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall
- Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room
- Ed O’Loughlin’s Not Untrue and Not Unkind
- James Scudamore’s Heliopolis
- Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn
- William Trevor’s Love and Summer
- Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger
Filed under: book reviews, fiction | Tags: children’s literature, coraline, fantasy, fiction, horror, neil gaiman, young adult
On a rainy day in her new home, Coraline Jones’ mother shows her a door that opens to a brick wall. But over a stretch of the overcast and final days leading up to a new school year, Coraline discovers a hallway through the door identical to her own home that leads to her apartment, her house, her yard. It’s a strange world slightly off kilter from Coraline’s reality and here she meets her other mother and other father: strange likenesses of her parents with buttons for eyes (and that want to sew Coraline’s eyes closed). When Coraline’s real parents go missing, she must return through the door to save them.
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is a children’s horror book written with children in mind, for children, and with the structural simplicity of children’s books. Coraline has thematic issues of losing and rescuing parents, searching for home, and exterior and interior realities. And it’s all a bit gruesome as the world is slightly off and includes button-eyed people, rats (enough to creep me out), and a hand that chases Coraline. I will say from reading the quotes on the book jacket I expected something stupendous and I thought it was fair (though I do look forward to the movie). I found it similar to Vivian French’s Robe of Skulls.
Conclusion: Tossed.
Filed under: book reviews, fiction | Tags: book reviews, fiction, quotes, serial novel, vanity fair, william makepeace thackeray
“We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.”
The other evening I was in the mood to just read a big, thick book – seriously, these were the only qualities I was looking for. I scanned over Anna Karenina and An American Tragedy, and finally tucked away on the bottom of my shelf I found a dusty copy of William Makepeace Thackeray’s serial tale Vanity Fair. I purchased the book at least a year ago and have given no thought to reading it until now.
Vanity Fair (“A Novel Without a Hero,” but instead two heroines) is primarily the story of Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley and their adventures and relations from finishing school through marriage through the Battle of Waterloo, etc. Thackeray has a robust cast of characters that he parades through Vanity Fair with delightful and witty insights and descriptions. The book is satiric, the book is critical, and (best of all) the book is enjoyable.
I was somewhat surprised by how readable the book is; I often find myself needing time to acclimate myself to period writing styles (such as Laurence Sterne or Jane Austen), but not with Vanity Fair. From chapter to chapter, Thackeray moves between different characters
Conclusion: Keeper.
Adventures in Reading 