Commencing in the last days of Saigon, this novel follows the fate of a Captain in the South Vietnamese Army. Aide to a General, bastard son of a French priest…Communist agent. The novel is written in the form of a confession given while in custody – we don’t learn until close to the end who has actually captured our protagonist.
I liked this book, by which I mean I thought it was good. However, I also did not like it, in that I did not enjoy reading it. So what happened? Continue reading The Sympathizer
In small-town Colorado, a 70-year-old widow knocks on her neighbour’s door. She gets lonely at night, she explains. She can’t sleep. He’s a widower, she guesses it might be the same for him. Will he come and sleep in her bed and talk to her in the night?
Continue reading Our Souls at Night
Married impulsively after a two-week relationship, Lotto and Mathilde are young, beautiful, and free. Lotto is gregarious and rich, Mathilde is quiet and has a mysterious past. Their friends predict it will be over in a year.
This is the second book in a row that I’ve read in which a marriage is narrated from the perspective of each of its members. Continue reading Fates and Furies
Following the death of Pearl, her daughter, Ada, and granddaughter, Pepper, move back into her dilapidated house by a river somewhere in rural England (Devon, according to interviews with the author, but I’m pretty sure that’s not mentioned in the book). Ada’s intention is to fix the place up to sell and leave again as quickly as possible, but she is gradually drawn back in to the community she fled, and is forced to confront the ghosts of her past.
Continue reading Weathering
Holidays are not a good time for downer reads. I knew this in theory, but it really sank in when, during a week in a beach house surrounded by my best friends, I attempted to read a book featuring a love story between a suicidal junkie and a needle exchange volunteer. Can you even imagine? I got, to my credit, a third of the way through it, before putting a pin in it and scanning back through my Kindle for a more holiday-friendly re-read. American Gods is what I came up with.
For me, a lover of fantasy generally and of Neil Gaiman in particular, diving back into this novel was like that first gulp of Friday night wine after a long, stressful working week. The premise, simply put, is that all of the gods ever worshipped by humans really exist; belief somehow generates them, and, since every culture eventually ends up in America, their adherents have brought them all there at some point. Continue reading American Gods
In the first story of this collection, the narrator/author’s grandmother (Abuelita), an artist, has her young granddaughters pose for her. In order to keep them from fidgeting, as she paints, she tells them increasingly gruesome Mexican fairytales; appalled and fascinated, they beg for more.
Continue reading Painting Their Portraits in Winter
It’s been pretty quiet on the Book Report front for a while now, and there are several good reasons for that, namely: (a) a re-read of The Lord of the Rings while on holiday in New Zealand because appropriate; followed by (b) a re-read of some Agatha Christie faves, also while on holidays, because it’s holidays and I don’t want to read anything depressing and/or that I don’t already know the ending of; followed by (c) the following.
Continue reading Cocaine Blues (et al)
The introduction in my (e-)edition of this book says that it was a “surprise international best seller” in 1926. To me, this is indeed a surprise, since the plot can basically be summed up as an answer to the question, “in what factual matrix would a nicely-bred, genteel Victorian spinster be motivated to make a literal pact with the devil in order to guarantee herself some peace and solitude?”
Continue reading Lolly Willowes
I’ve been wanting to read this FOREVER (three years) but kept putting it off: it’s the first in a series of novels and I wanted to wait until they were all available to binge on. I thought I’d made it, and only realised this morning that although the fourth and final one has been published, the English translation won’t be available till October. Bummer.
Continue reading My Brilliant Friend
This novel/memoir recounts its first-person narrator’s undergrad-aged navigation of body image issues, sexual assault, Native American racial identity, and bipolar disorder. If that all sounds like a pretty grim cocktail…well, it is. Somehow, though, the author keeps the whole boat relatively buoyant. It’s no mean feat, and owes a lot to the voice of the narrator, which is intelligent, self-deprecating, and at times fatalistic, but which, despite her experiences, seems to trend generally towards optimism. It’s an intriguing and likeable combination; I couldn’t help feeling that this was a person I’d be happy to be friends with.
Continue reading My Body is a Book of Rules
