Rules for Ruin by Mimi Matthews
My rating: 0 of 5 stars
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Friday, March 28, 2025
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Friday, March 14, 2025
Sunday, March 09, 2025
Review: Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Clear, lucid sociology showing how the personal is political.
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Review: Hench
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Seanan McGuire quote on the cover: "Fast, furious, compelling, and angry as hell." my emphasis, because I was all "Yeah! That's what I'm looking for!"
Review copy
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Review: Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When Masterpiece Theater ran the Anthony Andrews/Jeremy Irons version I was in high school and I fell in love. Just like Charles Ryder, I fell in love with the whole charming family. I still am. And although I never took to calling a stuffed bear after a saint, I probably did feel rather vindicated in my ongoing affection for stuffies.
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Review: Sisters in Crime 4
Sisters in Crime 4 by Marilyn Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A good anthology enables me to sample new writers. I'll probably never go back and reread this, but I'd recommend it to anyone who was looking for women writing mysteries (as I would recommend the others in the series).
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Review: The Rules of Magic
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really want to read this for the witches square in Halloween Bingo, but it doesn't drop until October 10. I'm going to have to pick a backup, maybe, although that is still 21 days. Hmmm.I
***
Yay! An advance copy is coming my way! Time to start obsessively checking the mailbox.
***
October 26, 2017
My very pretty copy has arrived. So even though I have bags and sacks of books that I am currently reading, this one gets to break in line, because it is shiny, and I am shallow, and I've been waiting so long. It finally cooled off enough to turn the heat on. My All Hallows Read finally feels legit, and not just wishful thinking.
Advance copy donated 2025
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Review: The Rules of Magic
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really want to read this for the witches square in Halloween Bingo, but it doesn't drop until October 10. I'm going to have to pick a backup, maybe, although that is still 21 days. Hmmm.I
***
Yay! An advance copy is coming my way! Time to start obsessively checking the mailbox.
***
October 26, 2017
My very pretty copy has arrived. So even though I have bags and sacks of books that I am currently reading, this one gets to break in line, because it is shiny, and I am shallow, and I've been waiting so long. It finally cooled off enough to turn the heat on. My All Hallows Read finally feels legit, and not just wishful thinking.
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Review: The Drowning Tree
The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Such a pretty cover, not that you can tell from the thumbnail, but trust me. I had this and the Mary Stewart 3-in-1 Merlin book on the coffee table at the same time. Same colors. One looks like some bizarre Jesus theory, the other looks brooding and mysterious. The girls and I all noticed.
Not just the cover is my cuppa. Something horrible happened twenty years ago, and now many of the same people are back in town and one of them ends up dead. More Laura Lippman than Barbara Vine, but very moody and atmospheric, and I love the bit about the artists, and the past resembling the present. With the mother and daughter pair it comes across as the Gilmore Girls in need of SSRIs. Plus there's a little insight into the making of stained glass, as well as the restoration thereof. Learning about an unusual job was always the coolest part of a Dick Francis.
Just a big old delicious pudding of impending doom.
Personal copy - loaned to Erin 06/21/17
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Review: Doctor Who: Plague of the Cybermen
Doctor Who: Plague of the Cybermen by Justin Richards
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Just the thing when none of the other books lying around are tempting. First, it's a Who fix, and the author managed to give it a good Matt Smith feel. Next it's set in a small town in Europe somewhere, sodden with rain, menaced by wolves, with a castle, so points for classic Gothic trappings. Then, it's steampunk Cybermen. It manages to hit that sweet spot for action without being too violent, with amusing dialogue, but seriousness of purpose.
I have suddenly discovered the delights of [whatever the word is for what is basically professionally-penned fan fiction?]. Now I know why the are 27 billion Star Trek and Star Wars books: it's fun to hang out in these universes.
Book Smugglers giveaway loot
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Review: The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
When I find myself making conversation with a new acquaintance, one of my favorite gambits is "What's the last really good book you read?" The answer almost always leads to a really interesting conversation, because even if it's been years since someone read a good book, whatever comes to their mind is something that evokes strong opinions. It's a nice way to break the ice without prying, and people who can't come up with anything usually have any interesting explanation for why they haven't been reading much, or why they haven't been loving anything they've read, or why the can't think of anything even though they really enjoyed the hell out of the last few books they've read. Once the answer was unexpected, because I didn't know Endless Love was a book, and I hadn't heard of Scott Spencer, and I would never have expected a guy to pick anything with "love" in the title. I may have laughed in surprise at the time, which is bad of course, but I was a teenager speaking to someone really famous for the first time....anyway, my apologies to everyone on that.
Once the answer was "The Princess Bride," which was a film I really loved, and again, hadn't realized it was based on a novel, but I could imagine that it was awesome. Reader, it was not awesome. It was a lovely fantasy story broken up by the constant intrusion of the author and his (entirely fictional) framing story that was unpleasant and boring, and ugh. After I finished I put the book on the shelf and didn't touch it again except to put it in a box when I moved and then put it on a shelf. And then one day twenty-six years later my son mentions he'll be reading it for a class, and there it still was, dusty, but otherwise pristine.
And then after he read it we talked a bit and were largely in agreement, with the addition of "fat-shaming" to Goldman's sins. It left me thinking I should try reading it without reading all the framing bits to see what I thought. And it's a pretty good adventure/fantasy/comedy, really funny in some scenes (the scenes that are reproduced on screen verbatim).
I won't be reading more Goldman. In this book, the only two characters who aren't treated with disdain are the grandson and Stephen King. Everyone else is stupid or evil or hideous or shallow or vindictive, or some combination thereof. Now there's a possibility that Goldman the author deliberately created Goldman the character to be irascible for humorous effect. But there is also the possibility that Goldman the author may have just been horrible. And I'm pretty sure that reading anything else by him would clear up that little mystery for me. So I'm going to pass.
Personal copy
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Review: Equus
Equus by Peter Shaffer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In the latter half of the 20th century, talk therapy was viewed as a kind of treatment for mental illness. Despite the fact that it isn't at all effective in treating psychosis, and is rarely effective in lessening symptoms of other mental illnesses, writers seized upon the idea of that dramatic breakthrough moment. In this play Shaffer asks what would make a young man do something so heinous as blinding horses, and decides that it's a fair cop, but society is to blame, because culture is trivial these days.
Yeah, in the 70s that passed for deep thought.
So, it's a stupid premise, but a great bit of drama.
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Review: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars
Corrigan and I don't overlap much in our tastes. I don't think I've ever described a book as "luminous" including The History of Luminous Motion. That's rather more of a disincentive to me. So I'm going to give up and give it back to the library.
2020 June 06
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