The revolution will be organized.
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Summer by Edith Wharton
When I finished Edith Wharton’s Summer, I slammed the book shut and turned to the boy in a huff: “This ending sucks!” I’m not one of those types who always wants a happy ending, but this heroine seemed to deserve so much better. Wharton created a truly unique character, one who so perfectly reflects the…
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The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
I had to take a brief break from this book to read some fiction when the author started explaining radiocarbon dating and atomic properties. But Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution is a compelling, accessible account of evolution that would make any creationist freak out. Which is reason enough…
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Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
I brought Anna Karenina with me on our flight to San Francisco last weekend, thinking that only being in a confined space with no other options would bring me to read more Tolstoy. Even though a course in nineteenth-century Russian literature had completely convinced me I liked none of it, I still felt obligated to…
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Library Thing is my new friend
I’ve discovered a new toy which I’m sure I’ll spend way too much time on. I’ve always wanted to create a database of all my books, and now someone has taken all the work out of the thing for me. I love that it populates the LC data for you, and that you can also…
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The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
I got The Buddha of Suburbia a few years ago, when I was taking a class in British Fiction at U Mass, but we didn’t actually get far enough in the syllabus to read it. I tried to read it a few months ago, but couldn’t get past the opening page. This week, while I…
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Comfort Books
Lately I have found myself doing a lot of re-reading, despite my goal to finish all the unread books that clutter my shelves (of which there are many) before I start school this fall. And what I’ve been re-reading! I’m craving the most mindless, frivolous books I have ticked away on the bottom, dusty, hidden…
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Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
I will admit that prior to September 11, I paid very little attention to America’s counterterrorist efforts, or even, really, to politics. Seems surprising, considering what a junkie I’ve become, but my youthful politics tended to revolve more around issues of women’s equality and anti-capitalism than foreign policy. Of course, I’m still a feminist and…
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Why is it harder to write about words?
Well, I certainly floundered at the starting block with this one. In the month since setting up this fancy blog, dedicated to books and libraries and other nerdy ephemera, I have written all of…oh wait, yup…nothing. It’s not that I’m not reading something. I’m always reading something. Usually multiple somethings. Currently, the hot ticket on…
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Words for nerds?
Besides cooking, the other major time sucker in my life is reading, so I figured, since I’m apparently on a roll, everyone should be subjected to my thoughts on books and various text-sources, right alongside my thoughts on tortillas and tortellinis. (I also figured my thoughts on the final two time suckers in life, beer…