bookkaddict

• Rated 4 stars

“Having just read John LeCarre’s “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” , which is such a serious British Cold War spy novel depicting the brutal and duplicitous world of espionage, it was great to follow it up with such a terrific parody of that world by reading Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana.

The novel is one of Greene’s self-proclaimed “entertainments” and it is truly entertaining. Jim Wormold is a British ex-patriot living in late 1950’s Havana during the regime of the dictator (but U.S. friend) Batista just before his overthrow by Castro. He is a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman whose wife has just left him, and he finds that his failing business does not give him the financial means to provide the extravagances that his spoiled but beautiful 16-year-old daughter Milly wants. Being the devoted father that he is, Wormold feels fortunate (and only slightly hesitant) when he stumbles into the spy business at just the right time. He begins recruiting fictitious agents and preparing fictitious expense reports and dispatching fictitious reports of secret nuclear installations accompanied by drawings that look uncannily like vacuum cleaner parts to the head office in London. And no one in the London office gets that he is making it all up. Ultimately, the lies become unintentionally intertwined with real people and events and the novel turns somewhat sinister, as though to remind the reader that the spy world that the characters inhabit is not a game but a world of danger where people can get killed.

Greene very successfully parodies the paranoia, the greed, the secrecy, and the brutality of the world of international espionage. He does a good job moving between the comic and the tragic, the farce and the horror. Greene is a really good writer and I highly recommend his work. I’ve read only two, this one and “Travels With My Aunt” which is another “entertainment” whose story is not what it seems at first. Try any Graham Greene and I don’t think you’ll regret it.
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bookkaddict wrote this review 4 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“I read this for the Author, Author group. I usually don't read much in the fantasy genre, generally. But....

September is a young girl, living in Omaha, Nebraska (hello, next door to Kansas, Dorothy!) circa WWII times, whose Dad is away being a soldier, and whose working Mom is basically Rosie the Riveter. She’s lonely…until her trip to Fairyland where she learns some important things about herself and life.

This is a delightful and imaginative pastiche of folk and fairy tales, but the book predominantly reminds me of Alice in Wonderland. There are certainly echoes of other well known books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (since there is a way to enter Fairyland through the back of a closet). I was frequently reminded of the Wizard of Oz, and there was even a moment of reference to Beethovan – the composer, that is, not the movie dog. There is even a Jewish folklore connection in the persona of a “soap golem” which was probably my favorite peripheral character in the story. What a very modern and often quite dark and scary take on a fantastical story of a little girl’s dream! Overall, very much fun to read and only just a tiny bit tedious here and there. I’m happy to have found this author and have every intention of trying more of her work.
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bookkaddict wrote this review Friday, March 23, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I read this for the Author, Author group. What a strange little book! My first David Sedaris. Not sure I should have chosen this one to start with, but ultimately I did enjoy it and it was a quick read. I’ll call it a cross between Aesop’s Fables and Fractured Fairy Tales. (Remember them from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show...those of you of a certain age that is…lol?) Some of the tales have a surprisingly disturbing twist at the end. Sick, actually. Some are pretty hilarious overall. Good for some smiles, for sure. The stories are very clever, and with very cute illustrations. I liked it enough to try something else by this author, so I would definitely recommend giving Sedaris a try, although maybe not this book specifically because this book certainly isn’t for everyone.”

bookkaddict wrote this review Monday, March 5, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Interesting concept with a rather conventional and predictable ending...but a good read nonetheless.”

bookkaddict wrote this review Sunday, February 12, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“By engaging in some overdue myth-busting, Stacy Schiff, in her extensively-researched biography of the most powerful woman of the Ancient world, gets us to take another look at The Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra. She argues where and how the historians likely got it all wrong, and talks about the making of the Cleopatra legend over the years by the likes of Cicero, Plutarch, Shakespeare, and Hollywood. The author has sometimes been accused of making too many assumptions, but I felt she worked very hard to make it clear whether she was working with documented facts, or was extrapolating based on the best historical sources available and how she came to her conclusions. And I found the abundance of cultural information presented about the wondrous cities of Alexandria and Rome in the times just before the birth of Christ to be very eye-opening and quite interesting. A very worthwhile read for me.”

bookkaddict wrote this review Wednesday, February 1, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Jody wakes up one evening underneath a dumpster and discovers in short order that she’s now a vampire. How did she get this way? What to do, what to do! She makes her way in her new life with the help of an aspiring writer named Tommy as they learn the pitfalls and pleasures of life after dark.

I actually bought this book years ago, on impulse, because I loved the cover art. Didn’t pick it up until now, but I have to say that it was a really fun, quick and entertaining read. I’m not a rabid fan of vampire books per se (except for Sookie), but I do like wacky novels. This is the first Moore I’ve read, and he reminds me a lot of the style of Carl Hiaasen, minus the social, environmental or political commentary, with that same wicked humor and moments of tipping over into the area of the complete gross out.

The peripheral characters were all great. Loved the setting of San Francisco, loved the employee antics at the Safeway store. Loved the homeless Emperor and his vampire-sniffing dogs. These and other wonderful details are what make this book more than just a standard comic novel. Don’t know if I’ll move on to the next books in this series…but I liked this one.
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bookkaddict wrote this review Friday, January 13, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Interesting people, interesting lives. I don't consider myself a big Norman Mailer fan although I've read several of his books...The Executioner's Song, Marilyn, The Naked and The Dead...all great reads. But this honestly told memoir by his sixth and final wife adds another dimension to what I thought I knew about this famous man and was surprisingly enjoyable! Glad I picked it up.”

bookkaddict wrote this review Friday, December 9, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Existentialist classic about a successful yet alienated 30-yr-old man on his personal search for a meaningful life. Novels of this sort are not for everyone, but they are always very thought provoking. Reading Percy's wonderful prose, his beautiful descriptive passages of New Orleans and its surrounds, and the sprinkling of humor throughout the piece are worth any additional time or frustration spent in contemplation of the author's point. And the ambiguous ending is absolutely appropriate. (I love ambiguous endings.)”

bookkaddict wrote this review Friday, July 29, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“This is one of the best books I’ve ever read…and it’s also one of the saddest and most haunting books I’ve ever read.

The book is a prequel of sorts to Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel “Jane Eyre”. You don’t need to have read Jane Eyre to enjoy Wide Sargasso Sea, but it certainly helps to at least know the story and you would get the most out of Rhys’ novel if you’ve read Bronte’s. Wide Sargasso Sea wouldn’t exist without Jane Eyre. I’m also a big fan of Jane Eyre, and the absolute best thing to do would be to read Jane Eyre first, followed by WSS.

The heroine, called Antoinette Cosway in WSS, is a minor character in JE…the infamous “madwoman in the attic”, Bertha Rochester. Jean Rhys once wrote of her reasons for writing WSS: “When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should [Charlotte Bronte] think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d try to write her a life.” So Rhys seeks to have the reader understand why “Bertha” is who she is. Actually, Jane’s character and Antoinette’s are a lot alike, but Jane manages to survive and Bertha doesn’t. WSS gives a Caribbean author’s viewpoint on why that could be.

If Jane Eyre is an English Gothic novel, then WSS is Caribbean Gothic. This book has everything. The lushness of a tropical landscape, the mysteries of Jamaican obeah (black magic), the clashes of two cultures, a historical setting (the Caribbean in the years directly following British slave emancipation), romance, passion, ghosts, gossip and betrayal,…like I said, one of my all time favorites. If you’ve seen either of the movie/TV adaptations of this book, they don’t even come close to doing this book justice. I highly recommend Wide Sargasso Sea.

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bookkaddict wrote this review Friday, March 18, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Amazing story of survival during WWII and its aftermath...the book is a page-turner. It includes a shocking and horrific account of the treatment of American POW's by the Japanese that often made me cringe. I was surprised at the brutality of it. One can't be naive about this aspect of war after reading this book. This is an important story about one man and his experiences, thoughts, feelings and fears; and by telling his specific story the author gives us a story of what is universal and "unbreakable" about the human spirit.”

bookkaddict wrote this review Monday, March 14, 2011. ( reply | permalink )