I finished thirtysomething books this year. Some of them came out this year, but not all of them. I’ve decided not to concern myself with the date of such things. Art endures and is not…
Posts tagged 2014 Books
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Here’s my advice when it comes to Karen Joy Fowler’s fabulous We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, don’t read anything about it at all. Skip the jacket copy, the blurbs, every review, including this one,…
Very Much Meh
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven a post-apocalyptic tale of a theatre troupe is a much-beloved National Book Award Finalist that seems to make people incoherent with swoony love. However, I don’t get the adoration….
Cranky Old Lady Reads a Book Full of Shitty Cliches
Epistolary novels are my genre kryptonite. I find them hard to resist and even harder to quit even when the going is not so great. This is the only reason I can give for finishing…
How to Build a Not Quite Successful Novel About a Girl
Up until my friend Kurtis read a NY Times review of How to Build a Girl, I had successfully avoided the work of Caitlin Moran. I’d heard a lot of buzz about her book How…
Wolf in White WTF?
I’ve spent the entire morning reading review after review of John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van, the debut novel from The Mountain Goats’ singer that was long-listed for the National Book Award. After reading each…
More Bitter Than Sweet
It is only now as I type that I realize I read two books back-to-back with the word ‘sweet’ in the title. Happy accident. I was attracted to Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore because it had…
Pretty Sweet
My favorite part of Fast Food Nation when I read it back in 2001 was the parts about the flavor factories in New Jersey. At least I think they were in NJ. I’m going with…
The Magic Passed Me By
Celeste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You has garnered rave reviews all over the place. I know this because I have read all these reviews hoping to discern the magic so many readers…
Pants on Fire
Some of my favorite reading experiences involve reaching that tipping point in a book where you make a conscious decision to eschew every other thing in your life to finish the book. That happened to…