★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My 75th book of 2023, which is a new personal record for the most books I’ve read in a single year. Many of the stories in this collection touch on the hard to articulate grief of losing a child, which hit home for me.
…★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What a strange little book. The narrator is slowly driven insane by all the commercial sounds encroaching on his family home: an auto repair shop next door, a nightclub across the street, an idling bus outside his bedroom window, all told in disjointed Kafka-like stream of consciousness. Made me appreciate the relative quiet I enjoy here at home.
I’ll give this three stars for the benefit of the doubt that a deeper meaning existed but eluded me.
★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A good premise perhaps weakened by too many characters and side stories. The depression era setting, poor living conditions, and the horrors of racism and cruel treatment of people with disabilities felt Dickensian. McBride held my attention by the end, but a good editor might have helped maintain it all the way through.
★★☆☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What to make of this confusing, author-indulgent, stream-of-continual-banter-and-bullshit book? Not much.
There are two stories that intersect in the most obscure ways: grief, longing for loved ones, perhaps a connection to the conspiracy beliefs of our modern day unreliable narrator? And what in the hell were we supposed to make of Lily, our bizarre and self-absorbed ghost?
…I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie MooreRead More »
★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A bleak, bleak story that could have been written about my upbringing. I am giving this book a five-star rating because of the writing and how perfectly Stegner captured the angst of living in the perpetual get-rich-quick ambition that plagues some people.
…★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What a delightful little book. I read this 36 years ago, so parts of it were vaguely familiar.
…When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night-there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A painful book for me to read — the story of a father losing his 17-year-old son. Mr. Ives – a religious and kind family man – spends the remainder of his life grieving. He relationship with the love of his life withers, he takes no more joy is in existence, he loses faith in God. Some 35 years after his son is murdered, he regains some of his faith through dreams, travel and forgiveness of his son’s killer. It’s a dark, melancholy book. I worried for myself as I watched Mr. Ives grieve over the decades following the loss of his son.
★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed this book so much more than I expected. Perhaps it’s the grief I have been feeling that has opened up new emotional channels. I found myself tearing up at multiple points in reading this book. I really cared for the characters: Lily, August, May, Rosaleen, these beautiful, wise women.
…★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third book by Amor Towles who is an inspiration to me. He published his first novel, The Rules of Civility, at 47 after spending a career in investment banking in New York. Imagine that!
This one has some dear characters: Emmett, Duchess, Billy, Wooley, Sally, and a few other incidentals thrown in. Duchess is a borderline psychopath that I came to adore by looking at his situation through his own perspective.
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★★☆☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A quirky book of short stories all centered around a young girl and her grandmother on a remote island in Finland. I chose this book to see if reading another’s take on island life might help me find my own voice on my experiences on Vashon. Mostly the stories seemed to center on the author’s childhood memories of her deceased grandmother. There were moments, but this one didn’t click with me.
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