![]() ![]() Elizabeth's tendency to spend the day in her darkened bedroom is hurting her marriage and scaring Rosie, who alternately longs to nurse her mother back to health and to strangle her for being so weak. ![]() Rosie's mother, Elizabeth, a recovered alcoholic, must fight the temptation to pin all her free- floating anxieties on creepy Luther, who's really just a distraction from her own troubling directionlessness and depression. This sense of foreboding, shared by just about everyone Rosie knows, is personified in the form of Luther, a shabby, middle-aged loner who hangs around the area's tennis courts watching the young girls compete. Safely nestled in suburbia, surrounded by loving adults, and bolstered by her success as half of the top-ranked tennis team in the northern California girls 14-and-under doubles, Rosie lives a life sufficiently all-American to include a haunting sense of impending disaster. After a very successful nonfiction run (Bird by Bird, 1994, etc), Lamott returns with her fifth novel seemingly refreshed and invigorated with a further exploration of the world of Rosie Ferguson, the awkward adolescent tennis champion first seen in Rosie (1983). ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() ![]() Okay now that I've got that out of the way: This book was awful. I'll start on a positive note: The narrator was excellent. Includes an excerpt from Ruth Ware's The Lying Game! Watson's riveting national sensation Before I Go to Sleep, this gripping literary debut from UK novelist Ruth Ware will leave you on the edge of your seat through the very last second. In the tradition of Paula Hawkins' instant New York Times best seller The Girl on the Train and S. Working to uncover secrets, reveal motives, and find answers, Nora ( Lee) must revisit parts of herself that she would much rather leave buried where they belong: in the past. Wondering not "what happened?" but "what have I done?", Nora ( Lee) tries to piece together the events of the past weekend. Forty-eight hours later, she wakes up in a hospital bed injured but alive, with the knowledge that someone is dead. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora ( Lee) to a weekend away in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her nest of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. ![]() ![]() ![]() It was very vulnerable, quite juicy and jaw dropping. She seems bubbly and likeable, very smart and yet down to earth, I’ll read about you. I mean…I know nothing really about her other than she was on TODAY and widowed with two young girls. I am super into autobiographies and pretty much will read any of them (hello, Blondie book that I’m still not quite sure why I read…), so when several of you suggested I pick up Katie Couric’s newest memoir, I was all in. I devoured her new autobiography Going There. ![]() So, let’s start with the two books I enjoyed this month… Today, I’m going to recap the two books I read in December to finish off my year and then, I’ll name my TOP THREE BOOKS OF 2021. I felt like my months ran either hot or cold. I read several books I really loved and honestly, for whatever reason, this year, I read many I didn’t love. I read some mystery and some suspense, I read several autobiographies and memoirs, my fair share of chick lit and some really great works of fiction too. Reading is my favorite hobby, but I truly love it so much more because I get to share it with YOU! I love spending my time waiting at doctors appointments, in carpool line, early in the morning or late at night with a book. That is a lot of blog content year after year, and this post right here is always, without a doubt, my absolute favorite. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, each year, I blog about 500 posts. ![]() ![]() It’s a huge accomplishment for one of the defining architects of my pre-teen reading experience-a time spent spelunking in second-hand bookstores for his gloriously risque thrillers about murderous love triangles, horny football stars, cursed VCRs, and time-traveling aliens. “But maybe at my 50th anniversary, I'll say, yeah, I had a show on Netflix.” “I thought it was really cool, what she had done,” he says, and I can almost hear him smiling on the other end of the line. I imagine at the 50th anniversary, it will be more intense.” The winner back then was a woman who had become a well-respected surgeon and developed some new medical techniques. At his 20th high school reunion, the last one he attended, “they had a vote for who was the ‘Most Successful’ in life… like a competition. “I’m curious to see who’s alive and what they did with their lives,” he says But he’s also interested in returning to his suburban LA hometown to admit his poorly kept secret: He’s the author of several best-selling YA novels beloved by teens all through the ’90s and early 2000s. Next summer, at his 50th high school reunion, Christopher Pike thinks he might go and finally say something about what he’s been doing since graduation. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She was a patron of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire. Pompadour was a major patron of architecture and decorative arts, especially porcelain. On 8 February 1756, the Marquise de Pompadour was named as the thirteenth lady-in-waiting to the queen, a position considered the most prestigious at the court, which accorded her with honors. She was particularly careful not to alienate the popular Queen, Marie Leszczyńska. She secured titles of nobility for herself and her relatives, and built a network of clients and supporters. Pompadour took charge of the king's schedule and was a valued aide and advisor, despite her frail health and many political enemies. She was the official chief mistress of King Louis XV from 1745 to 1751, and remained influential as court favourite until her death. Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour ( / ˈ p ɒ m p ə d ʊər/, French: ( listen) 29 December 1721 – 15 April 1764), commonly known as Madame de Pompadour, was a member of the French court. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Carie’s emotionally impoverished marriage and exile provided Pearl a tragic example of the price that women pay for the loyalty to codes and customs that oppress them. ![]() Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1996). ![]() Buck’s mother had “accompanied her husband to China, where she was homesick for the remaining 40 years of her life,” writes Peter Conn in Pearl S. However, Buck also observed the suffocating effect of Absalom’s work on his relationship with his family, especially his treatment of Caroline. Buck International’s biography of Buck notes that she “played with Chinese children and visited their homes … she later used this material in her novels.” When Buck was 5 months old, the family moved to China, eventually settling near Nanking they chose to live among the Chinese people rather than in a missionary compound. Buck International, based in Bucks County, Pa., it is helpful to search her upbringing as the daughter of a missionary in China.īuck (1892-1973) was the daughter of Absalom Sydenstricker, a Southern Presbyterian missionary, and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker. To understand Buck’s work as the author of The Good Earth and founder of the organization that became Pearl S. “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday,” author and activist Pearl S. ![]() ![]() ![]() The two went on to collaborate on Dark Horse’s the Mask and their creator-owned series Major Bummer, originally published by DC. His first gig was illustrating a moody detective one-shot entitled Homicide, written by John Arcudi. A consistent interest in the medium, coupled with some art skill, landed Doug a job drawing comics for Dark Horse at the age of 24 (the date is known precisely, as it occurred just two weeks before he wed his lovely bride). His most recent work includes Batwing and Catwoman.īorn in 1963 in the Year of the Rabbit, Doug Mahnke embarked on a love affair with comics at the age of five, having received a pile of Spider-Man issues from a rugby-playing college student named Mike who lived in his basement. ![]() Winick came to national attention when appearing on MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, his experienced inspired his memoir, the award-winning Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned. Writer/artist Judd Winick has handled most every major character in the DC Universe including notable runs on Green Lantern, Green Arrow, The Outsiders, Justice League: Generation Lost and wrote the critically acclaimed animated feature Batman: Under the Hood, based on his run on Batman. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is, says Larson, ‘simultaneously a person and a thing’. ![]() Whether as ritual object, anthropological specimen, grisly aide-mémoire or (amazingly) domestic gewgaw, the severed human head has served many purposes. Among the lessons of this vagrant history of decapitation and display is the ease with which such ‘lumps of matter’, which once were parts of people, may be incorporated into daily life. The shrivelled brown head of Plunkett, immured in its elaborate vitrine, is one of many instructive relics or trophies in Severed, Frances Larson’s fascinating book. Consequent nightmares were all the more lurid because at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda – on a primary-school excursion, no less – I had looked in those very eyes, or at least their sockets, and imagined a July morning in London when the saint’s guts lay on the ground. As a child in Ireland in that decade, I knew all about Plunkett and his obscene end: my mother had hung a portrait of him in my bedroom, and I’d torment myself by turning it over to read an account of the execution – ‘his bowels taken out and burned before his eyes’. Three centuries later a scrap of linen that had touched part of his body was said to have cured an elderly Italian of her deadly disease, so Plunkett was canonised in 1975. ![]() He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and stray bits of his corpse were distributed among waiting friends. Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, was the last Catholic martyr to die at Tyburn, in 1681. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He says, "Among many other largesses and rich endowments, bestowed by the Creator's bounty upon the soul of man, the sentiments and impressions of the world to come, and the ability of reflection and self-intuition, are peculiar, invaluable, and heavenly gifts."Īmong many other largesses and rich endowments, bestowed by the Creator's bounty upon the soul of man, the sentiments and impressions of the world to come, and the ability of reflection and self-intuition, are peculiar, invaluable, and heavenly gifts. ![]() Pneumatologia: A Treatise of the Soul of Man is one of the puritan, John Flavel's, best works.This treatise covers the divine original, excellent and immortal nature of the soul, its love and inclination to the body, with the necessity of its separation from it, considered and improved, the existence, operations, and states of separated souls, both in Heaven and Hell, immediately after death, asserted, discussed, and variously applyed, divers knotty and difficult questions about departed souls, both philosophical, and theological, stated and determined, the invaluable preciousness of humane souls, and the various artifices of Satan (their professed enemy) to destroy them, discovered, and the great duty and interest of all men, seasonable and heartily to comply with the most great and gracious design of the Father, Son, and Spirit, for the salvation of their souls, argued and pressed Flavel is one of those ancient scholars and church leaders who had a profoundly capable ability to speak to the issues of the heart. ![]() ![]() His only intimate relations are with a barren widow – though he’s tiring of that and he does long to have a family of his own. Hunt is determined to circumvent the curse – he won’t marry and he won’t sire a child. ![]() They will never live to see their firstborn son and heir take his first breath. ![]() The Lairds of MacLarin have been cursed for five generations. Now, she is on her way to Scotland to live with her brother and his wife – in disgrace.Laird Hunt MacLarin is cursed – literally. When Clara came to her senses, she saw only one way out – she told him that she was expecting another man’s child. Her friend, Marian, had tried to dissuade her from the betrothal, but Clara was determined. Lady Clara, sister to the Duke of Autenberry, acted impulsively and ended up betrothed to a cruel man. ![]() |