Reviews and Comments

this is supposed to be a trilogy but i've just found out the third installment is out-of-print, and not available even through interlibrary loan! what a shame: this book is dense with narratives - it merits numerous rereads. set on the cusp of nazi germany, in town known for it's diversity and cultural currency, each event is made more sinister by our knowledge of where it ends up.

got this one entirely because of the title. turns out it's another blogger cum author but I didn't take it too seriously, read it breezily like a blog, and had quite a few belly laughs over it. (note to self: never listen to a book on tape from a blogger turned author. their niche really is that small feeling of you-and-I. and books on tape are read as if to an audience)

great series of pre-war berlin. with the backdrop of so much unease - between the communists and nationalists, between the gentiles and the Jews - people reach out for any and all distractions: the arrival of jazz music, lesbian nightclubs, orgies & drugs. Lutes' third, and last book, is out of print and no where to be found. i am distraught.

this is supposedly the beginning of science fiction and - after you get used to the archaic language and his use of the main character postulating theories before the reader has a chance to formulate his own - it's actually quite a gripping story. i was on the edge of my seat at times.
i read this alongside ds as we did this novel as a literature study. there were many times that ds was supposed to create his own sci-fi situations, but his scenarios always seem to involve the rich gaining control of the army and moving to a deserted island. this may just be a reflection of how little sci-fi he's read in the past.

this was a good primer for someone who is going to read anne frank: diary of a young girl. it spans her entire life and so it covers alot of the political background of the time (even things that anne herself doesn't comment on in her diary). there are lots of asides that are labelled 'snapshots' and they do a good job of expaining world events or political movements in the context of her life. all in all, a great book that will emphasize - once again - that anne frank was not only a real person, but also a real talent that was lost when nazism spread across europe.

his is why I go to bookclub - I enjoyed this book about disassembling a tiny newfoundland fishing village and it's stubborn patriarch. and I liked that it wasn't all 'henry david thoreau' (or even gary paulsen come to think of it) and the guy cannot survive alone, be it the weather, the weevils, the madness of having no human company. but going to bookclub made me realize that every tiny possible death that happened, did happen. and that he never made it off those rocks with his dead grandson in his arms.

I was expecting something more from the author of Unwritten but this was a typical, contrived high school movie. it wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either.

what a charming book. no wonder the man won the Newberry with it. filled with fanciful inventions, immense treasure, and high risk adventure, this book might even get my youngest reading beyond comic books. even hubby remembered this tale from school and was thrilled to see it on our kitchen counter.

the third and final memoir in her series. I still loved the first one the best, but the first half of this book was quite funny in its own right. interestingly enough, if you just read this one, you'd wonder why someone deigned her life worthy of a memoir - it's not terribly exciting or pressing - but I imagine there was a clamor for her first 2 books to continue.

i read this one. often, when it's a comedy book, i'll get the audiobook instead. this one i read.
in comedy, delivery is everything. the written word just doesn't do it justice. i laughed out loud 2, maybe 3 times. but mostly it was a breezy, easy to read account of how this girl from 'the office' got to where she is. in that aspect - it was interesting: she's the writer for 'the office' and had a hit off-broadway show she wrote and starred in. it's nice to know that plain people who seem to make it big out of nowhere actually have a long path that took them there.

some hit, some miss. but some that hit were incredibly funny: shout-out to George Kaufman for 'annoy kaufman, inc' and Robert Benchley's 'it's fun to be fooled...it's more fun to know' and - believe it or not - woody allen's 'the kugelmass episode'

heard that this author was supoosed to be funny, and this book was specifically mentioned - so i put aside the dry memoir i was in the midst of to read this.
i laughed a few times, sure, but overall it was mild crap. it reminded me of other British fluff i've read - like Bridget Jones's diary, or the shopaholic sries, or those useless novels i read while at the dude ranch 2 summers ago (which were so much fluff, i can't even remember the plots, let alone the titles).
back to the memoir. ho-hum.

ok, i joined another book club and i was dreading this sci-fi title. even though i've recently discovered i like sci-fi, i assumed it was only the current stuff. this book was published in the '70s and i envisioned all the crap that hubby used to read (with sexual caricatures for women, and just plain boring details of futuristic machines)
anyhow, it was engrossing. it helped that the author's note made it clear he was writing through the prism of the Vietnam War (and that, because it was obvious, publishing houses wouldn't touch it) the novel spans centuries of warfare and the character progresses through the chain of command so there always something new to learn. there's space travel, and there's a future earth, and there is the senselessness of war. and somehow, there's also a happy ending. what more could you ask for?

i'm still trying to wrap my head around this book - there's a sense of danger (real or imagined) throughout the story; some of it 'light' - adultery, escaping a locked house, a collision with a moose - and some very dark - suicide, rape, and murder. figures of authority abandon their code of conduct - but not always with a negative result. medical students are elbow deep in the gore of anatomy and dissection, but are also elbow deep in the vulnerability of love and poetry