Love, family, nature
~ A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House ~ An Irish descendent riding up Rosebud Mountain to clear the land passes an eighteen year old Cherokee girl of such stunning looks that he cannot get her out of his mind:...
Oscar Shorts
The big films get all the Oscar buzz. People argue about whether The Irishman should have got something and whether Saiorse Ronan deserved it more than Renee Zellweger and whether the Oscars discriminate against female directors and women-oriented films (me:...
Life changes in Nairobi
~ A Change in Altitude, by Anita Shreve ~ Patrick (from Chicago) and Margaret (from Boston) meet and fall in love, and after 2 years together – “married five months” – move to Kenya. Paul is a medical man who...
Blood and Money
~ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. By John Carreyrou. Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 when she started her company in 2003. She had a squad of major-league cheerleaders — senior professors at Stanford, angel investors,...
Dangers of oversimplification
~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~ A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end. ,Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in...
Same difference?
~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~ This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people. Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience...
70-year slog
~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~ This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of...
“Champor-champor” culture
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
Appalachian Miseries
~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~ Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young...
Predictable Gothic
~ The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell ~ Having read Purcell’s The Corset, perhaps my expectations for the same fine read in The Silent Companions were to set me up for a little disappointment. The novel takes place in three...
Tedious gangster fare
~ The Irishman. A Scorsese film. ~ De Niro. Pacino. Pesci. in a Scorsese period-piece film about the Mafia. Sounds like an entertaining way to spend an evening, right? Lauded by critics, nominated for many awards, the film is a...
A Turbulent World
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
Predators and Enablers
~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~ This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest. Ronan Farrow’s name and history are...
Engaging kopitiam reading
~ Sarong Party Girls, by Cheryl Li-Lien Tan ~ “Not say the States is very near, you know.” (translation: That is not to say the US is close to Singapore.) p145 “You see, ang mohs in Asia, step one is...
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