Reviews of this book that came out in 2012 said that it was challenging to read. I was influenced by that but took note that Jennifer spoke highly of it and now finally, I have listened to it. I loved it. In some ways the audiobook was challenging; it's almost inevitable that you miss the occasional bit if you listen while walking in a noisy place as I often do. In parts of this book...
Just at the time Miss Garnet came to the end of her teaching career, her friend and housemate Harriet died. With that loss, Miss Garnet came to realize how much she would miss the more lively Harriet and she impulsively (for a change), decided to live in Venice for six months. In the beautiful Venice she has experiences she never expected, makes friends of all ages, and discovers emotions she...
These are my favorites of the books I read in 2016. I read 50 books this year and 11 were by Australian writers. My initial list of favorites began with 17 titles and it was painful to reduce it to 11. The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. Whenever I read my post about this book again, I am flooded with respect for this writer and with memories of the searing artistry of this book...
I cannot possibly recount all the important bits I want to remember about this book and it is even less plausible for me to give an overall accounting of the book. The NYT review does the latter admirably and I will just record a few of my favorite ideas. While teaching philosophy at UMass-Lowell, John Kaag happened on the private library of John Ernest Hocking who taught philosophy at Harvard...
This summer I asked Mariflo if Another Brooklyn is as good as it sounds and she said “it is that good.” And, oh boy, she is right. The narrator August tells the story of her early childhood in Tennessee and being taken with her younger brother to Brooklyn by their father. During their early years they spent their time looking at Brooklyn of the 1970s through the window while their...
The Floating Garden is set in two time periods: around the turn of the 20th century when a young girl goes to Sydney to escape her drunken father and 20 years later as her neighborhood is being destroyed by the building of the harbor bridge. Ellis' father began beating every creature in sight after the death of her mother and had turned to her. Though she grew up in the isolated countryside...
Once again it was Tony's Book World that moved me to listen to this book by his review of Rose Tremain's most recent book The Gustav Sonata. I was in the market for an audiobook and after reading the comments on his review, settled on this one. The varying opinions about Rose Tremain's books by three of my most revered bloggers (ANZ LitLovers, Reading Matters Blog, and Tony) was...
It's was Tony's enthusiasm and having appreciated Bail's Eucalyptus that prompted me to read this book. I wasn't surprised by its strangeness; after all, Tony described it as ambiguous, elusive, and enigmatic. The tale begins in a conventional way: two 40-something women leave Sydney for an adventure in western New South Wales on a sheep farm. Erica teaches philosophy...
I read this book in 2007 and wrote only two sentences in my blog about it at the time. I have now gone back to it, partly because once I read Lila, I realized how little I retained. The scope of the story is ambitious: John Ames is 76 in the mid 1950s. He brings to life his grandfather, a firebrand who was a founder of their aboliitionist town in Iowa. In the mid-1850s Iowans...
Peter Ho Davies writes four takes on the experience of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the US. First comes the horrific stories of Chinese people driven to journey to the Golden Mountain (the US) to escape their unspeakable lives in China. Much was familiar from previous reading I have done: daughters being sold into prostitution, the humiliation of men operating laundries...