nomadreader

The backstory: Lionel Shriver is an author whose work I've enjoyed immensely in the past. After raving about So Much For That  ( I gave it 5 stars ), I also enjoyed We Need to Talk About Kevin  ( I gave it 4.5 stars ) and The New Republic ( I gave it 4 stars .) I'm utterly fascinated with both her work and her as a person, because her books and characters are so distinct. The basics: Big Brother  is the story of Pandora, who grew up in Los Angeles with a father who starred on a popular 1970's family sitcom with parallels to her life. She now lives in Iowa with her husband Fletcher, a health nut, and his two children. When her brother Edison, an accomplished jazz pianist, arrives for a visit, Pandora cannot believe how obese her brother has become. My thoughts: I didn't realize this novel is set in Iowa until I began reading it, and it was a treat. From the point of view of this Iowa transplant, Shriver nailed the details, the positive and the negative, of everyd...

In my continued attempt to catch up on reviews, here are mini-reviews of two films I've seen this fall! The Queen of Versailles I expected The Queen of Versailles , a documentary detailing how billionaires Jackie and David Siegel react when they must stop building their dream home, the largest home ever built in the United States, to highlight their excesses. I did not expect this tale of lavishness (and to some extent cluelessness) to make me feel guilty for my own excess. This documentary is extraordinary in two ways: when filming began, the market had not yet collapsed, and the Siegels were living preposterously large. Their demeanors change, just as their lifestyle must, as the film progresses. Yet beneath all of their extravagance is a warning of scale: our financial position is precarious, even at my much, much more minimal level of income. It made me question what living within your means actually means--across all income levels. It's not all serious, however...

This spring has been a hectic one, and it's pulled me away from the blogosphere at times. Here are some of the things I've been up to: Elle  magazine Reader's Prize Each month, Elle  selects fifteen readers, sends them three books, and has each reader rank them and comment on each one. I participated years ago in the non-fiction category, but it was so much fun to participate in fiction this spring. Fiction and non-fiction alternate months, and then at the end of the year, all of the fiction judges will read the monthly winners and crown a grand champion. It's a book tournament all its own. Our picks appear in the May 2012 issue ( it's also online ), but I read them all back in February. The titles were: The New Republic  by Lionel Shriver ( my review ), The Red Book  by Deborah Copaken Kogan ( my review ), and The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler ( my review .) I didn't know how the votes turned out until I received my issue on my Kindle Fire last week....

The backstory: Originally written in 1998 and rejected by publishers, Lionel Shriver's The New Republic  still feels like a modern, contemporary novel. The basics: The New Republic  is a satire of terrorism, which sounds preposterous, but Shriver manages to be witty, evocative, informative and engaging. Corporate lawyer Edgar Kellogg decides he wants to become a journalist. With little experience, he lands an interview at a national newspaper. Against the odds, he gets a job covering Barta, an invented peninsula off of Portugal that has a newly active homegrown terrorist group. The reporter who had been covering it, Barrington Sadler, has gone missing. The job is Edgar's until Barrington returns. My thoughts: Despite having read and enjoyed two of Shriver's earlier novels, We Need to Talk About Kevin and So Much for That -- which made my top 10 of 2010 , I was somewhat apprehensive about The New Republic . Would it really be good enough to publish now when it wasn'...

The backstory: We Need to Talk About Kevin  won the Orange Prize in 2005. My thoughts: If you happened upon me on Twitter while I was reading it, you're probably surprised I not only finished the novel but ended up loving it. About a third of the way through, I bean to struggle mightily. Although I found Shriver's writing was gorgeous, the action was quite slow to build. As I bemoaned to Lu at Regular Rumination (who hated it), she admitted the ending was almost interesting. It, as well as my love for So Much for That  ( my review ) and how many trusted friends loved this novel, convinced me to keep reading. Soon, something intriguing happened, and I was hooked again. I devoured the last half of the novel and haven't stopped thinking about it since I finished it a month ago. We Need to Talk About Kevin  gets billed as a 'school shooting novel,' 'the novel that will make you not want to have kids,' or 'a study of nature versus nurture.' None of ...

2010 was a wonderful year of reading. I wanted to be a deliberate reader, and looking back on the books I read this year, I'm quite pleased with the quality of them. I stuck to literary fiction for the most part. I tried to read from the award lists, and I discovered many of these books on the award lists. Without further ado, here are my favorite books of 2010 (when I made my list, there happened to be ten!)  All the books I read in 2010 were eligible regardless of when the books were published. (Clicking on the links will take you to my full, original review. Clicking on the book cover will take you to it's page on Amazon.) 10. Trespass  by Rose Tremain (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize) I will remember 2010 as the year I finally read Rose Tremain. This hauntingly beautiful novel has stayed with me. Favorite passage: "Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to the...