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Summer Reading Challenge 2016: An Introduction
Is summer my favorite season for reading? No. But it is one of four of my favorite seasons for reading; like the fall is for school, summer is for books. It calls for cleaning out To Be Read (TBR) lists, looking for what’s new on the shelves of bookstores (and in publishers’ calendars), and seeking out new and old favorite spots to spend time [reading]. There’s just something about the summer that makes me want to do all of these things, more so than in other seasons. Last year, I tried tackling the Penguin 80 Years of Bestsellers Reading Challenge, and came up quite short, even though I had already read…
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Review: Little Bird of Heaven
Murder, scandal, family, growing up; Joyce Carol Oates’s Little Bird of Heaven begins with semi-appealing oddity but sadly never flourishes into an exciting timeline of events. The first half of the novel is told through the mind of Krista, the daughter of Eddy Diehl, an accused murderer of Zoe Kruller with whom he commits adultery (he’s not the only man in Sparta, New York to do so). The second half is told from the point of view of Aaron, the son of the murdered. Like our narrators, the other characters, a handful or so, were awfully non-dimensional; it was quite difficult to connect with any of them. Dramatic scenes were too dry,…
A blog about books and miscellany
