"By the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton’s narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive."
-- R. F Kuang, _Babel_
TIL that Jane Seymour may have died because she was attended during childbirth by royal doctors instead of experienced midwives who knew to check the afterbirth to make sure the placenta was expelled. As Jennifer Loach put it in her biography of Edward VI, "A lesser woman might have received better treatment."
(It just occurred to me that this exact thing happened on Downton Abbey.)
"The server brings over two bowls of hot udon. I look at my daughter as she grabs chopsticks and spoons from the box of utensils. She looks tired, or thinner, or older."
-- Kim Hye-jin, _Concerning My Daughter_
It's here! The big book preview for the first half of the year from The Millions.
https://themillions.com/2023/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2023a-book-preview.html
Here's what I'm most excited about that I didn't know about before:
* The Survivalists
* After Sappho
* The Wife of Willesden (does this mean we get _two_ Zadie Smith books this year?)
* Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
* Ada's Room
* King: A Life
* I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
"He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work."
-- Russell Banks, _Lost Memory of Skin_
#SundaySentence #books #cosobooks
Two thoughts about Young and Damned and Fair, a biography of Henry VIII's fifth queen:
I'm genuinely impressed that Gareth Russell managed to squeeze 650 pages out of a not-that-interesting woman who died while she was still in her teens.
I cannot get over the sheer number of people whose lives were ruined because a flighty teenager got bored with her middle-aged husband and started a flirtmance with an ex-boyfriend.
@fpkthree What do you mean by "list of your books"? You can see all the books you've read by going to your Profile page and clicking the View All button in the Read Recently panel, if that helps.
"It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years--ragged shirts, bits of rope, . . . There had been bodies, too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching forward as though to indicate that they had made the journey together and did not now wish to be parted."
-- Karen Jennings, _An Island_
"I thought Rushdie was trying too hard to convey _hilarity_, Keystone Kops slapstick, the speeded-up fun of the fairground, while simultaneously dealing with weighty matters of Indian history and identity. James Joyce had a word for this quality: 'jocoserious,' the business of being both earnest and strenuously farcical at the same time."
"I was dazzled, impressed, bewildered, and frankly exhausted. It was brilliant -- and it was just too much to process. All the dreams and mythologies, the births and deaths, the arguments and magic transformations, the tumbling, endlessly distracted logorrhoeic cascade of words and subjects, the jumping-bumping, hyperadrenalinated, huggery-muggery, jiggery-pokery tsunami of special effects. It was all very impressive but just a touch _frantic_.
I have never read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, but John Walsh's take on it in Circus of Dreams sums up my feelings about Rushdie's work in general:
The jogger, the first person to see the peak of the volcano sprouting from the middle of the reservoir in Central Park, in the early hours of June 2, thought the volcano was a breaching humpback whale. . . . She stared at it for a full minute--stretching all the while--before continuing her run. She couldn't afford to stop any longer because she didn't want her heart rate to drop.
-- John Elizabeth Stintzi, _My Volcano_
* Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson -- A coming of age tale about a teenaged couple who make an arty, ambiguous poster with an ominous tagline and then stand back and watch it wreak havoc on the world. Frankie and Zeke are memorable characters who really come to life.
* Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver -- I am not usually a Kingsolver fan; I find her too didactic, moralistic to the point of self-righteousness. But it turns out that her teacherly voice is a perfect fit for the Victorian social novel. You'll probably enjoy this more if you have a good memory for the characters and events in David Copperfield, but even if you don't, Kingsolver has managed to tamp down the homiletics here, making for what is probably her best novel to date.
* Lessons, by Ian McEwan -- McEwan's best book in years. There's no Atonement-style twist at the end; this novel is just the reflection of a older man on the decades of his life and how they led to him to where he ended up. Long, yes, but thought-provoking and filled with elegant prose.
* Africa Is Not a Country: Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa, by Dipo Faloyin -- Don't expect a sober recounting of African history: this book is a cri de coeur in the mold of Shashi Tharoor's An Era of Darkness. This eye-opening book will make you sad, angry, & (hopefully) thoughtful about the way Westerners talk about Africa. It will also inflict upon you a great craving for jollof rice. (If you're in the Canton area, I can recommend the Senegalese version at KG's African-American Grill.)
* The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell -- A novelistic portrayal of Lucrezia de Medici, with a killer first paragraph and a narrative that is gripping even if you know Lucrezia's life story. Beautifully written, you will never see the famous portrait the same way again.
* Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism, by Joanna Scutts -- A non-fiction account of Heterodoxy, a group of women in the 1910s and 1920s who met to talk about their lives, politics, and the new-fangled concept of feminism.
* Trust, by Hernan Diaz -- I don't always love puzzle novels but this one really worked for me. An exploration of a woman's life from four different perspectives, in which the truth doesn't emerge until the last page.
* Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel -- A high-concept cartwheel through history, bringing together characters and ideas from Mandel's previous novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. Is life worth living? Yes, Mandel says, yes yes yes.
Sophronisba
Joined Oct 2022