Category: Book Challenge 2016
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Quoted: Love in the Time of Cholera
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
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The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Yes, I’m still working on my 2016 book challenge. Since The Painted Girls fulfilled the “something your mom recommends” category, I present to you my genius mother’s review: “This book called my name from several places—bookstores, airports, discount chains—so I finally gave in and purchased it. Having a niece in the ballet industry, combined with my…
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Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
You’re smart people, so by now you’ve probably figured out that I’m not the biggest fan of European classics. Dickens certainly did not meet my expectations, great or otherwise, I did not have a whale of a time reading Melville (heh!) and I’m sorry, but for all the fuss about Dorian Gray, his death was my favourite part…
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Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
This book is an award magnet. It won the Scotiabank Giller Prize (praise be!), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction (holla), and was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (hella impressive). So you can bet I was expecting it…
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The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion
If you haven’t read The Rosie Project, you should go do that now. Because you can’t read The Rosie Effect without first reading its predecessor, and you should definitely read The Rosie Effect. It’s funny, it’s heartwarming, it’s hyper logical, and it’s disastrous in all the best possible ways. An easy read perfect for the bathtub (not where…
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Quoted: Dead Souls
He liked not so much what he was reading about as the reading itself, or, better, the process of reading, the fact that letters are eternally forming some word, which sometimes even means the devil knows what. This is generally how I feel about reading.
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William Shakespeare’s Star Wars by Ian Doescher
When you’re a fan of the Bard and a fan of the Wars, there’s nothing to do but to read this book. Peppered with insightful asides, well-crafted Shakespearean insults, and elaborate illustrations (see below), this book/play/novelization, written in perfect iambic pentameter (the English major in me is whooping appreciatively), actually gave me a better understanding…
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Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart
After a disappointing erotic romance and a 520-page French classic, this light-hearted memoir of a charmed summer in 1945 New York was exactly what I needed. The first women to ever be employed as pages at Tiffany’s, Marjorie and Marty spent four short months living the dream (on a strict budget of $20 a week, of…
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The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Like most things in my life, my love for Dumas’ famous musketeers stems from a Disney movie. Starring the thespian talents of Kiefer Sutherland (Lordy, that voice), Oliver Platt, Charlie Sheen (long before he had tiger blood coursing through his veins), and the hunka hunka burnin’ love that was a twenty-three-year-old Chris O’Donnell as D’Artagnan, the 1993 version…
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Ask for It by Sylvia Day
You know, it’s not often that I don’t like a good romance—especially one that’s fraught with peril, intrigue, strife, and steam—but this “erotic romance” novel (as it is branded on the cover) just did not measure up. Maybe it’s because I’ve read a tonne of Sandra Brown novels (Hey Zeus! that woman can spin a sexy…
Being Tori 