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What I've Finished Reading

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene. I don't know why I liked this little book so much when the other two Greenes left me cold. Maybe because the main character's sexual relationships are all in the past, so I can't hypocritically turn up my nose at his Human Weakness (TM). Maybe because he ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

I liked Among Others a lot more than I expected to like it in the beginning, which was the opposite of my experience with The Just City. Mor has to choose between joining her dead sister in the world of the fairies and going back to her living boyfriend and their book club, then finds that she's already made the choice. ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

The Heart of the Matter

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

The Victim reached a point after which I physically couldn't put it down, or at least had so little inclination to that it made no difference. I read it while chopping onions and mushrooms, and I read the last two chapters standing up at the sink after brushing my teeth, having made a resolution to go to bed that I could ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

I've been trying off and on for about a year to finish a book called Catastrophe Planet by Keith Laumer. The Tolkienist challenged me to read it because its first-person narrator has no interiority at all, a condition that sounded interesting to me at the time but is actually very boring in this case. It is ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen! It's so good. It's a lot less intense than Persuasion -- Catherine's younger than Anne Elliot, and her anxieties and frustrations and hopes are much more youthful and less heartwrenching -- but it has the same mix of clear-eyed detachment and close emotional engagement that made ( Read more... )