I really enjoyed this book
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
My review of Karen Russell’s much-anticipated novel Swamplandia! appears in today’s Edmonton Journal, as well as right here online.
I didn’t love it as much as most people, but there’s still plenty to recommend. Since we’re in an exclamatory mode, click through!(!!)
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The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene (1940)
In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.
Fiction Island Map from Jasper Fforde’s new Thursday Next book, One of Our Thursday’s is Missing
The National lists their 10 most overrated literary classics. While I don’t agree with most of this list, I do like their suggestions on what to read instead.
Gloria laughed at them and said she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (via mangofreee)
(Source: johnsteinbeck-)
Somehow it’s difficult to picture the man who wrote Matilda ever saying the words “all f***** out.” Even if he was a bit of a stone fox.
Ah. Have you not read his adult work? Highly recommended.
Including: To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations, and The Historian.
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (via)
One book down and it’s one I’ll be pushing on friends and unsuspecting strangers for years to come. The Queen’s Gambit is the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan and chess prodigy, and the novel follows her life and career from ages 8 to 18 as she climbs the ranks of the male-dominated chess world.
The prose won’t blow you away; this is just a solid, can’t-put-it-down read. And the chess - who knew the strategy of the game could be this deeply sexy?
(favorite)
