Writer_Builder_Nomad

Writer_Builder_Nomad

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Curiousity and kindness are my rule.

**Regarding friendship invitations: if you have not left me a note, we don't belong to the same groups, do not share similar taste in books, and have otherwise not 'spoken' I will not accept your invitation. I'm not...more »
  • where cranberries float
  • member since July 2007

Reviews

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Displaying 1-10 of 322 reviews
  • The Cloud Atlas
    • Rated 3 stars

    Japanese balloon bombs in WWII Alaska. A crazy Princeton man with one leg. A beautiful Yup'ik girl with a gift. An alcoholic Shaman, one of the last of his kind. A young soldier straight from a Catholic orphanage.

    This was an interesting story, with interesting characters. It suffers by it's unevenness. Sometimes it drags on. At the end it speeds through the conclusion.

    This feels like a first novel. I think next time Callanan will have a bit more control.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 11 days ago. ( reply | permalink )
    • Rated 4 stars

    I didn't find this to be a unique 'glimpse into the Victorian psyche,' but it was an interesting retelling of the old moral tale of sexual awakening and it's pleasure and pain.

    It is a lush, easy to read, moral tale of two sisters. One of whom is seduced by fruit of the goblin men (wink). It's moral is extremely plain but it's language is never overdone. It's never over-rhymes or falls into excessive verbiage.

    My favorite twists are that Laura was not ruined by her experience (she recovers and marries later and even tells her children about the experience). The sickness she feels is clearly internal, based on the fact that she can not relive the pleasurable experience (naughty goblins). It takes a sacrificial sister to snap her out of it and make her realize the bitterness of her situation so she can let go. It also makes for one of the most interesting scenes of redemption I think I've ever read.

    A very feminine poem and the good safe world is feminine. The male world with all of it's toady goblins and their beautiful words is clearly against us and we need to link together sister to sister. Girl power! circa 1862.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
    • Rated 3 stars

    More tales from the table. Reichl remembers her years as a food writer for New West, California, and The LA Times. Along the way we meet famous characters like Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, and Danny Kaye. Honestly, I didn't enjoy this as much as Tender at the Bone, her memoir of her childhood or Garlic and Sapphires her memoir of food critic for the New York Times. For one thing, Reichl engages in a few affairs (as does her husband) and a lot of the story centers around those. For another there isn't enough of the wonder and madcap humor found in the other two books.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
    • Rated 5 stars

    Biography and autobiography of a grandmother, mother, and daughter raised in China over the last hundred years. The grandmother lived at the end of the 'old time' and was the concubine of a warlord general. The mother was raised during the Japanese invasion and the rise of the Communists. The daughter was raised during the cultural revolution.

    This is a fascinating book if you're interested in Chinese history. Chang's parents were high communist officials in Sichuan during the '50s and '60s so she has a lot of the inside scoop on the why the Cultural Revolution was started, how it was kept going, and how it effected the people of China. Definitely more understanding of the background of the CR then Bette Bao Lord's anecdotal Legacies (although I loved that as well).

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons: A Novel
    • Rated 3 stars

    Another of Minnesotan writer Landvik's chick novels, this one concerns a book club that meets for 30 years from the '60s-90s. Births, deaths, raising kids, smoking, drinking, sex, politics...you name it. At first it seemed very much like a rerun of Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (the different members, their various problems, the lesbian daughter vs the different members, their various problems, the gay son), but after reading 2/3 of the book I thought Landvik was getting a bit more in depth with the characters.

    It was a decent book, written in an easy to read style. The characters were interesting and fun. At some point it occurred to me though that anyone not like the title characters was boring or just plain wrong. I had to shake my head. Bonus points for a difficult coming out (gay son telling his mother) scene that I thought was somewhat realistic and for having an interesting take on religion (liberal but still important to many of the characters), but I couldn't shake my disappointment somehow.

    Okay.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • Becoming Madame Mao
    • Rated 3 stars

    A historical novel of the life of the infamous wife of Chairman Mao who led much of the Cultural Revolution. Lunhe/Ping/Jiang was an interesting character, an actress, with a strong will and a need for strong men. She definitely found her match in Mao and lost herself a bit in the role. I found a lot of this interesting after reading Jung Chang's Wild Swans, but the constant shift between first person and third person narration here gave me a headache. I kept wondering if the difference was in the author's source material (diaries and journals vs. history books). Handy bibliography in the back.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft
    • Rated 3 stars

    Young student Heyerdahl spent his honeymoon living on a South Sea island for a year doing everything by hand. As part of his time there he learned many of the stories and myths of the Polynesian people and noticed a marked similarity to many cultural tales and traditions of Western South America. After WWII he theorized that some of the original Polynesians came from SA by balsa raft over 4000 miles of ocean. He was laughed at. So he gathered a group of 6 men and set to work building a raft of the old style and materials and sailing across the Pacific. This is the story of that journey.

    It's a great tale. He certainly had me convinced. My only critique is that Heyerdahl underplays every danger and humorous moment. In the hands of another writer this would be a grand adventure tale, instead it's a dryly humorous recounting of a major undertaking. Worth the read if you enjoy adventure or anthropology.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel
    • Rated 4 stars

    Enger's second novel, the first being the very popular Peace Like a River, which I highly recommend.

    Despite the title this is not a love story, unless you count a love for the idealized world of cowboys and outlaws. Enger focuses on a young writer with a family in the 1920s. He had great success once but can't seem to do anything new. He meets an older man with a boyish temperment. Turns out he was an outlaw long ago and left his young wife Blue to escape the federales. So starts a cross-country trip to find remarried Blue and gain forgiveness.

    There are many themes of forgiveness and grace in this novel. Also a lot of the male psyche of an earlier age, full of action and boast, hope, courtesy and idealism, and the sad choices which make them more hard and inflexible.

    A gentle novel despite gunfights, horse roping, water pirates, and other feats of daring-do.

    Recommended, although it's not as amazingly written as PLaR. It took me a bit longer to get through this. I had a harder time getting into the characters and this is very character-driven.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink )
  • When Worlds Collide (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)
    • Rated 3 stars

    This book is old enough that not only I read it in high school my mother read it in high school.

    One of the early Earth apocalpse novels and an interesting read (like another reviewer the thousands of books used as insulation made an impression on me..as well as the idea that women would take on full time family duties and several 'husbands' to propigate the gene pool) but not a great one.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review Monday, September 29 2008. ( reply | permalink )
  • A Thousand Acres: A Novel
    • Rated 3 stars

    Somehow I expected more from a Midwestern epic of Shakespearean proportion.

    This comes off as another abusive family in disarray novel, an Oprah pick. It rarely reaches beyond that.

    What is done right is that it follows the 'obedient' daughters instead of the one who defies her father and it seeks to find out what this obedience has cost them personally.

    Writer_Builder_Nomad wrote this review Monday, September 29 2008. ( reply | permalink )
Displaying 1-10 of 322 reviews


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