I have enjoyed two books by this author (Someone and After This), both of which I admired and appreciated. This one, as I read in a description, begins with a suicide and ends with a possible murder, so the reader is prepared for grimness. The Catholic Church always figures in McDermott’s books whose characters are generally Irish. In this one we see the church in both a good light and in a...
While I was happy to listen to this book as I cooked, dug around in the dirt outside, or folded clothes, I couldn't help but notice it didn't come up to the standard of the other two Rose Tremain books I have appreciated (The Gustav Sonata and Trespass). It is the story of Lev, a Polish man forced to leave his village to make money for his daughter and mother. He had worked in a sawmill...
I guess it's not surprising that Toibin's take on the lives of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra is pretty wonderful. I have loved everything of his I've read. Having read Aeschylus' Oresteia years ago, I was conscious of the basic plot, which, I should say, does vary with the storyteller. Agamemnon needs a wind to set sail to make war and the gods...
This 2010 book was the author's first; it was recently published in the US and reviewed in the New York Times, perhaps because of the acclaim her second novel (The Railwayman's Wife) has received. I want to rely on that review for capturing the wonder of this novel so beautifully while I record some tangential bits that I want to remember. Three stories are set in...
This book is a compilation of conversations between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers describing Campbell's teaching on mythology. The conversations occurred near the end of his life and are pretty free wheeling at times. I listened as I worked and marked a few passages on my phone that struck me as of particular interest. Below are my efforts to reproduce them. Campbell says that every...
This book was an interesting mix of laugh-out-loud funny moments, embarrassingly silly not funny jokes, and an interesting take on digital lives of people of a certain age. He did a significant amount of research on the subject and along with Eric Klinenberg, sociologist from NYU, did some focus group type of research himself. They contrasted the ways people met each other in the 40s to current...
This book was recommended to me decades ago by a work colleague but I didn't stick with it. This year Jennifer recommended it and I learned there was a 2017 audio version of a translation done in 2005 of the trilogy. I am amazed to find that it held my interest for its 44 hours. This saga of a Norwegian family set in the fourteenth century was written in the 1920s and won the author...
Much as I appreciated his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I was not prepared for this brilliant work. The tone of the book is an unemotional telling of the upheaval of societies throughout the world in the near future. The audiobook, read by Hamid himself made the recounting of the most dramatic events told in a calm voice all the more disquieting. As we are introduced to the main...
I was unfamiliar with this Irish author and listened to the audiobook as a result of Reading Matters’ enthusiasm for her books. The plot had some very familiar elements, but a variation that I found quite appealing. The main character is a free-spirited woman who does free-lance writing and lands temporary university posts lecturing on Irish literature. Clara has just returned from one of...
Tony's characterization of this book, "light playful fun, perfect for listening to rather than reading" was convincing enough for me. I recall being quite taken with Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, apparently read in the pre-blog days. The book is set in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1970s and concerns events that occurred in 1945 just around the time of the birth of Jake...