Rated A Feast for Crows 6/10
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Wants to read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: On Rock Music
Rated The First Bad Man 8/10
Every Miranda July story is about two or more people whose ability to function in a social setting is deeply compromised in a distinct, different way, and how they react to each other. It's always a little disorienting and it's a weird place to spend a lot of time. I mean this in a good way; she is a lovely and clever writer.
Rated The Tiger's Wife 8/10
Doesn't quite hang together like I was hoping - it seems a little scattered between four or so storylines - but so beautifully written and evocative that it hardly matters.
Rated The Moor's Account 8/10
Really well-done - a great story. It takes place in the 1550s in the New World; it's based on a true story of lost Spanish conquistadors, told from the perspective of a Moroccan slave. Highly recommend.
Rated The Empathy Exams 8/10
Leslie Jamison is an exceptionally talented writer. She's better when she has something really concrete to talk about than something abstract, but her voice is really powerful and she's a sharp observer. This set of essays is mostly on sad topics - pain, oppression, heartbreak, diseases people might not have, crimes people may not have committed, and in particular the way Jamison herself reacts emotionally to all of these things she encounters.
Rated The Secret History 8/10
Great great writing, well-drawn characters, really establishes a world and then brutally deconstructs it.
Rated Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe 8/10
Loved this! Freewheeling, dry-witted, not-especially-comprehensive history of the very weird Hapsburg Empire. He's a really digressive writer, sometimes to the point of being rambly, but he makes up for it with an eye for the strange and a way of conveying just how arbitrary and contingent the borders of modern Europe are. I read this in preparation for a trip to Vienna, Budapest and Prague - the imperial cities of this no-longer-existing empire - and it gave me a lot of great guidance on where to go and what to look for.<br/><br/>Highly recommend to history buffs, though not if you're looking for something crisply academic. Delightful and sad.
Rated Cuckoo 10/10
A horny, gory, delight
Edited 46d ago
Rated Hands 6/10
<a href="https://smus.com/books/john-napier-hands">Full review on smus.com</a>
Rated Weetzie Bat 8/10
Bits of this don't hold up, compared to my teenage love for this book, bit it's still an unusual fairytale. I could do without Weetzie's exotizing of other cultures, and since this novella is just the beginning, there's not a lot of firm plot to speak of, but this reminds me of a certain time and place. My nostalgia is forgiving. This book is a teenage fantasy, and it's a reminder of how far we can grow.
Rated Out of True 8/10
Despite a tendency to try and tie too neat of a bow on some of the poems' endings, I really enjoyed this collection about a life knocked off-kilter by love.<br><br>(My full review appears on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2012/10/out-of-true-poems-by-amy-durant.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.)