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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| Let It Snow selection (One Book, One County)This is like Giants in the Earth, except a Chinese family instead of a Norwegian family. Lots of minute detail, little sense of drive to the plot, and characters I don't really care about. Oh, but this has more bad language and sex. Soooo...that makes it worse.
The one thing I thought of today that had the potential to make this book interesting: If the man's ex-girlfriend (the woman he pines over but who always used him and treated him horribly) is to be equated with China, the country he left but still vaguely misses.
Anyway. That was interesting. But not worth-slogging-through-everything-else interesting. (At one point in the book, the main character dismisses another character's literary work as "reportage," which made me wonder what the author of A Free Life thought he was writing.)
I would have put it down a while ago if it weren't one of the last books I needed to read for the Let It Snow program. I can't believe they chose this for the One Book, One County selection.... | | |
| Let It Snow selection (Michigan Author or Setting)This book tells the story of Covert, Michigan, an actual town whose residents made a concerted effort to integrate and to live side by side regardless of color...and this beginning in the 1860's. | | |
| Let It Snow selection (Listen to an audiobook)One of the Let It Snow categories was "Read aloud to someone or Listen to an audiobook." I attempted to read Alice in Wonderland aloud to my parents over my Christmas vacation. Sadly, I did not finish it. As runner-up, I chose an audiobook. This book contains, as the title hints, a collection of stories by Oscar Wilde. My favorite: "The Canterville Ghost." My least favorite: any of the fairy tales. Apparently it was all the rage at the time to rip off the style of Hans Christian Andersen. And apparently Wilde shouldn't have tried, because his fairy tales were exceedingly maudlin. Yup. I just criticized Oscar Wilde. That's right. I did enjoy the other stories. It was just a little upsetting that the audiobook saved the worst/weakest stories for last. | | |
| Let It Snow selection (Tropical Fiction)Connie recommended this book for the Tropical Fiction category. We'll be covering it in book club soon, so I don't want to give too much away. For now, suffice it to say that Mister Pip is and is not the central figure of both Great Expectations and this book, which is set on an unnamed island (assumed to be in the neighborhood of New Zealand). Rebels and redskins, mothers and daughters, reality and fantasy all overlap in various ways throughout the story. I do feel like discussing this book. I'm glad we're going to be doing just that soon. | | |
| Literary Guild Selection (Trudy's pick)Oh, wow. Turns out I got behind on my reading journal again. Here's a bit of catch up.... For this month's book club, we read Giants in the Earth...there were a lot of ellipses...and almost as many exclamation marks...! I had a hard time with the ellipses and punctuation marks. They threw off my reading groove. The book is about a group of Norwegian settlers who come to the Dakota Territory and attempt to make a life for themselves there. It centers around a woman who is profoundly unsuited for this life, and her husband who is profoundly invested in it. Simmering conflict ensues on the wife's side, although the husband remains, for most of the book blissfully ignorant that anything much is wrong because she's not much of a one to address problems outright. I would do the book better justice, but I'm already up too late and I want to rush my way through a few more entries.... Favorite quote: "When the quarrel had finally worn itself out they had found themselves at opposite ends of the earth, though lying side by side in the same bed." | | |
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