17 posts tagged “a-z”

I read this book in just a few hours. I generally have a difficult time digging through Marquez's language, but this was a lot easier to read. (I've been trying to finish Love in the Time of Cholera for months...) I really loved the story and kept wishing it was a bit longer.

It was a very sensual book but not overtly sexual. I enjoyed that. I wish that some of the love letters that were referred to so many times had been included. Maybe just one at the end.

The cover art is gorgeous too. Always a bonus. (The picture here is not the same as my copy. I had the art that shows up on Amazon.)

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It was a quick and very good read.

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"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." So begins Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and it becomes even more unlikely as the novel unfolds. This slim volume contains the story of the sad life of an unnamed, only slightly talented Colombian journalist and teacher, never married, never in love, living in the crumbling family manse. He calls Rosa Cabarcas, madame of the city's most successful brothel, to seek her assistance. Rosa tells him his wish is impossible--and then calls right back to say that she has found the perfect girl.

The protagonist says of himself: "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay ... by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once ... My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist ... and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness."

The girl is 14 and works all day in a factory attaching buttons in order to provide for her family. Rosa gives her a combination of bromide and valerian to drink to calm her nerves, and when the prospective lover arrives, she is sound asleep. Now the story really begins. The nonagenarian is not a sex-starved adventurer; he is a tender voyeur. Throughout his 90th year, he continues to meet the girl and watch her sleep. He says, "This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were ... That night I discovered the improbably pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty."

Review

Yay! The new Yarn Harlot book!!! I was so happy that I didn't have to wait a million years to get this from the library. I completely devoured it (like I've done with all her other books.) It was funny and clever and it reminded me why I love knit. And why I continue to knit even when I feel like ripping my hair out sometimes.

I hated the graphics and colors of pages though. Blargh. Very ugly and not really needed. I would have been perfectly happy with a more simple design.

I really loved this book. There was so much detail, so many little plots woven through the book.

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Sisterly rivalry is the basis of this fresh, wonderfully vivid retelling of the story of Anne Boleyn. Anne, her sister Mary and their brother George are all brought to the king's court at a young age, as players in their uncle's plans to advance the family's fortunes. Mary, the sweet, blond sister, wins King Henry VIII's favor when she is barely 14 and already married to one of his courtiers. Their affair lasts several years, and she gives Henry a daughter and a son. But her dark, clever, scheming sister, Anne, insinuates herself into Henry's graces, styling herself as his adviser and confidant. Soon she displaces Mary as his lover and begins her machinations to rid him of his wife, Katherine of Aragon. This is only the beginning of the intrigue that Gregory so handily chronicles, capturing beautifully the mingled hate and nearly incestuous love Anne, Mary and George ("kin and enemies all at once") feel for each other and the toll their family's ambition takes on them. Mary, the story's narrator, is the most sympathetic of the siblings, but even she is twisted by the demands of power and status; charming George, an able plotter, finally brings disaster on his own head by falling in love with a male courtier. Anne, most tormented of all, is ruthless in her drive to become queen, and then to give Henry a male heir. Rather than settling for a picturesque rendering of court life, Gregory conveys its claustrophobic, all-consuming nature with consummate skill. In the end, Anne's famous, tragic end is offset by Mary's happier fate, but the self-defeating folly of the quest for power lingers longest in the reader's mind.
Review.

I guess this book must be out of print. It's one of the many childhood books I was re-reading.

It's a fictionalised account of the Salem Witch Trails. It's an okay book, but I wanted to smack some of the people around for not speaking up and telling the truth.

When turbocharged Park Avenue mom Ivy Ames finds she’s been downsized from her high-powered corporate job and her marriage, she swiftly realizes that she’s going to need a whole new way to support herself and her two private-school daughters. At first she does the obvious thing: she panics. Then she decides to put her years of marketing savvy to work and dreams up a brilliant new business - helping upscale New Yorkers get their little darlings into the most exclusive kindergartens in the city. Ivy enters a parent-eat-parent world where the egos are directly proportional to their owners’ enormous incomes, peopled by her only-in-Manhattan clients, including:

- Lilith Radmore-Stein, a newspaper mogul who is willing risk her entire empire in a demented effort to get her son admitted to Harvard Day
- Omar Kutcher (“Kutcher the Butcher”), a cold-blooded mob boss who seeks Ivy’s counsel on whether to bump off or pay off the powers-that-be to get his “little pistol” into the city’s best all-girls Catholic school
- Stu Needleman, Ivy’s most obnoxious client, who threatens to ruin her if she won’t help his four-year-old unibrowed daughter cheat on her kindergarten entrance exam
- Willow Bliss and Tiny Herrera, the biracial lesbian parents of an adopted wheelchair-bound black child who is the “triple crown of diversity” that every school will covet

From the backstabbers of corporate America to the leading toddlers of Fifth Avenue, The Ivy Chronicles is more than an insider’s look at this elite and utterly preposterous universe. It is also a tale of midlife reinvention and unexpected romance - for anyone who has ever lost what she holds dear and had to start over again.

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I finished this a few nights ago. I was unimpressed. It was light like I expected, but didn't really do that much for me. There were several characters that might have been interesting had a little more time been spent on them. I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't bother to read it again or recommend it.

This is the last book in the second trilogy of the Griffin & Sabine series. I have to agree with most of the reviewers of this book. I really felt like it was lacking a lot of the spark and enchantment that captured me in the first 3 books. I couldn't put them down, but this one was kind of mheh.

Granted, I really should have re-read The Gryphon and Alexandria before reading this book... I was a little lost about some bits, but remembered as I got further along. I enjoyed the sensuality in this book, but it ended abruptly and felt incomplete.

The art, as always, was magnificent. I love the art in all his books. It just amazes me.

I finished this last night. It was a very enjoyable read about the healing qualities of knitting. I really liked the idea of it -- knitting as meditation. The comforting motion of the needles in your hands and the joy of making something of out a bit of string. At some points it was a little disorganised and muddled, but the message came across nicely and that made it worthwhile.

Number 36 for the year and my second "K" book.


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This small, quite wonderful book shows all that knitting and meditation have in common--and it's more than some might suspect. In short essays, Lydon, a longtime knitter and dabbler in spiritual disciplines, winds her way through spiritual quests, physical problems, and, of course, yarn. Any knitter will readily identify with Lydon's take on the frustrations of knitting--the sweaters that don't fit, the half-finished projects that litter the house--but she also takes readers beyond the finished project and shows them how to appreciate the process. Seeing knitting as a road to contemplation may surprise some readers--perhaps even a few knitters--but by the end of Lydon's journey, most will agree that knitting "is the simplest and most ordinary of activities, yet somehow it mysteriously contains within itself the potential for expanding our conscious awareness."

I heard about this book on NPR back in December and just happened to see it the other day while I was at the library. I read it last night before bed and really enjoyed it. I was hoping for a few more Addams Family themed cartoons, but overall I really enjoyed it. It basically deals with relationships, the differences between men and women and marriage. It might make a cute wedding gift for someone with the right (black) sense of humor.

(Excuse the giant photo, but I wanted the illustration to show clearly.)