My Christmas read was kind of a dud
Snow by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a beautifully written but dull book. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and the snowy landscape wasn’t particularly evocative of any specific place (and I did so want it to feel really Irish), and did nothing to heighten tension. It’s really only about two and a half stars worth of the same old story of priests abusing children.
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It’s been a bit more than a month since Playing Army was released and I’ve got some things to say about how things are going. But as is typical for me, what I have to say doesn’t necessarily match up with what people mean when they ask that question. Probably they want to know if…
First, the unboxing video! Videos of writers opening boxes of their books are A Thing. By now you’ve all seen the cover of Playing Army, but this is where I hold the physical book in my hand for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuKDmHRCgfQ Yay! And thank you to Colette for making the video, but I wish…
A bit of a book review, more moodlin’ than maudlin: A conversation went deep at the Little Ripon Bookshop the other night, discussing how family stories are shaped and told (in reference to Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder, a not very sympathetic fictionalization of her grandmother’s life that was shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize)….
NB: I wrote this review originally as part of a program at my local library, comparing books to their screen adaptations (such a fun idea! Go to your local library, people!). The Margaret movie was new at the time and getting lots of praise from people whose opinion I respected, so I gave it a…
My Dearest Bea: Love Letters from the USS Midway by Peyton H. Roberts My rating: 4 of 5 stars I don’t know what it is about epistolary books, but lately I can’t get enough of them. Something the author says in her postscript rang true to me: “As handwritten correspondence becomes a lost pastime, I…
All of my journaling about staying in a bad situation or going to an unknown (but also guaranteed to be difficult) one led to two pro-con lists that cancelled each other out entirely. What was good about one element was negated by something pretty awful on the other side.
