nomadreader

The backstory: The Forgotten Waltz  is on the 2012 Orange Prize longlist. It also won the 2012 Carnegie Medal . The basics: Gina recounts both how she fell in love with her ex-husband and how she came to cheat on him with her current husband. My thoughts: This novel was my first experience with Anne Enright, and her writing enraptured me from the beginning. She has a way with observational detail I adored: "I end up talking to a woman who is sitting beside a plate of chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way. They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then she pulls back in surprise. 'Ooh, pink!' she says." In such an observational novel, it's difficult to separate Enright's writing from Gina's observation, and I loved both. For the first half of this novel, I was utterly enthralled and bemoaned never having read Enright before. As the novel progressed, however, my adoratio...

The backstory: The Grief of Others  is longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize  and was a finalist for the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize . The basics: Chronicling the lives of the Ryrie family, The Grief of Others  begins in the present with the death of its newest member, an infant who lived only a couple of days. Then John's daughter, Jessica, conceived in college, shows up pregnant and alone because her mother has kicked her out. The novel jumps back and forth a few times to depict the events and better understand the present and how they all got to this place. My thoughts: Leah Hager Cohen writes with guts, and she's a strong writer. It's impressive to have a baby die in the opening pages of a novel and it not seem utterly depressing: "He was a he, too, astonishingly—not that anyone expected him to be otherwise, but the notion of one so elemental, so small, carrying the complex mantle of gender seemed preposterous, the designation “male” the linguistic equiva...

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'...

Welcome to Week 11 of  A People's Read-a-long ! We're reading a chapter a week, and I'm finding the pace deligtful.  Note: the hosts have switched to posting every other week instead of every week, but I'm bucking the trend and posting every week. This week is a week everyone is posting.  (Missed the earlier posts? Check out my posts for weeks  one ,  two ,  three ,  four ,  five ,  six ,  seven ,  eight and nine , and ten .) My thoughts:  Chapter 11, entitled "Robber Barons and Rebels," focuses on industrialization, the corresponding shifts in populations, and the rise of workers rights. On a personal note, there is something guilt-inducing about reading about the rise of the workers rights movement while on a blissful nine-day paid staycation. Here are my favorite tidbits and trivia from this (long) chapter: I'm oddly fascinated by population shifts: "Between 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to...

The backstory:  Elegy for Eddie  is the ninth Maisie Dobbs mystery novel. Here are links to my reviews of the first eight books:  Maisie Dobbs ,  Birds of a Feather ,  Pardonable Lies ,  Messenger of Truth ,  An Incomplete Revenge ,   Among the Mad ,   The Mapping of Love and Death , and A Lesson in Secrets .  (There may be some minor spoilers from earlier novels in this review.) The basics: Elegy for Eddie  opens with several of Maisie's childhood friends seeking her help. Their mutual friend Eddie has been killed in a factory accident, but they believe he may have been murdered. My thoughts: Reading a Maisie Dobbs novel feels like hanging out with an old friend. It's comforting, interesting, and engaging. After reading the first eight books in this series last year, it was so refreshing to once again have Maisie back in my reading life. While I've enjoyed all of the Maisie novels, The Mapping of Love and Death  was m...

The basics: Arcadia is the story of a central New York commune. It begins in the 1960's, but it stretches into 2018. It's also the story of Bit, the narrator. He was the first child born to Arcadia. My thoughts: As I sat down to read Arcadia , I expected the story of an Ithaca, New York-inspired commune in the 1960's. I got that, but Groff delivered much more too. Although this novel is firmly grounded in realism, it exhibited many of the traits of a dystopian novel. There was a sense of world-building among the Arcadians. They shared the ideals, but they had to find ways to made ideals reality. I also didn't expect the novel to be narrated by Bit, who is five years old when it begins. I didn't particularly like Bit as a character, but I didn't dislike him either. His narration worked. I enjoyed seeing the world through Bit's eyes and mind. The open nature of Arcadia ensures there are not doors closed to him because of his age. While he does not understa...

The backstory: There but for the  is longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize . The basics: Ali Smith imagines a man comes to a dinner party as a guest of another and stays. He takes salt, pepper and his silverware to their guest room, where they then begin to slide narrow food under the door to him. My thoughts: While the set up to the story is intriguing, it immediately begs many questions. Why not break the door down? Why not call the police? Smith addresses these issues with some success, but it's safe to say practicality may not be the point in this hyper-realistic novel. I felt it to be both in the real world and outside of it, and this tension was fascinating. This novel is split into four sections: There, but, for, and the. Each section is wildly different in tone and character, but they do all form a somewhat cohesive whole. The first section was perhaps my favorite, as it sets the tone for the novel. It's an introduction into the world of this novel, which felt both...