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Summer Reading Challenge 2016: The Home Stretch
Well it’s that time of year again when readers across the land scramble to finish their summer reading lists, prepare for new fall reads and holiday book hauls, and maybe get caught up with real-life people. I have done quite a bit of the latter, am not even thinking about the second, but am a strong participant in the first. My Summer Reading Challenge ends not with August, but with the autumnal equinox on September 22nd. With that in mind, here’s a recap of what I have completed, and the titles that still reside on my To Be Read list.
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Summer Reading Challenge 2016: Disgrace
I’m not going to think about how close the end of summer is; instead, let’s talk about Disgrace. J.M. Coetzee wastes no time in launching us into the life of fifty-two year old David Lurie in Disgrace. Lurie is divorced, currently on his way to visit an escort named Soraya, and has “to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” I am hung up on this sentence because although Lurie is confident and sure of the actions of sex, he is almost clueless when it comes to the consequences and implications of those actions. If you haven’t already guessed, sex is a big driver of this novel, although place, society, and prose play large…
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Summer Reading Challenge 2016: The Pier Falls and Other Stories
There’s nothing better than a summertime read that so thoroughly describes the tragic, horrific event of an ocean pier falling and taking human life with it. The title of this short story collection by Mark Haddon (and consequently, the title of the first of these stories) is so simplistic, so matter of fact, yet no detail between the covers goes untouched. The first moments of the pier’s destruction to ten years after are well constructed, and while the scenes can be difficult to read, not reading is even more grueling.
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Summer Reading Challenge 2016: A Discovery of Witches
What makes this novel spectacular is not just its length; not just the invocation of hunger for the next sentence, the next page, the next chapter; and not just the web of characters who become suddenly connected although they have been that way all along; no, what makes this novel so spectacular, is Deborah Harkness’ use of the French language; deep knowledge of creatures outside the ordinary human species; the gut-wrenching, goosebump-inducing relationships; the historical wines and delicious descriptions of them; and, and, the unavoidable attention paid to art.
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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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2015: A Review
Here it is – the last week of the year. Now is the time to revive those old new year resolutions and try to cram them in during the next few days and become a better person than you were last year [and throughout this year]. Or, maybe it is the time to look back on all of the changes you made, and commend yourself for adding more happiness and satisfaction to your life. Or, maybe you’re fully ready to say f*** it to the past three-hundred sixty some-odd days and plow full speed ahead into 2016. I fall under the umbrella of each of these, and as many others like…
A blog about books and miscellany
