Reviews and Comments

A good book about smart octopuses

because I really like the cloisters; maybe this author didn't do them any favors, but i'll probably go back there sooner than i would have so maybe they did. I thought the character dynamics were a bit clichéd and there were a some tantalizing possibilities that didn't get developed.

I love George Eliot’s writing. I was reminded of this one when I saw that @mouse was reading it and went to see if I had a copy. I found it, then I couldn’t put it down. (I’m very suggestible when it comes to George Eliot and Jane Austen) Where Austen is almost all sparkling dialog, I love Eliot’s descriptiveness, the way she captures the feeling of a place down to the dirt and the rocks. The characters are relatably weird and superstitious; the cultural norms and beliefs that shift from village to village make me nostalgic for an unconnected world. Morality in the story is very black and white but that gives it the quality of a fable. It casts Silas Marner as a kind of spiritual figure, an outsider who becomes the moral center; kind of a conduit for the metaphysical life of the village.

this is very funny so far.

In which our protagonist imagines herself in an 18th century gothic horror novel but soon learns that the social milieu of 19th century England is the real horror.

revisited this (as one does) after a long time. It has not aged well, in a cultural sense. is there a period of time, like a limbo, before a book becomes an artifact that still has value? it's amazing to me that this story about some privileged white kids sheltered in an upper-east-side-of-manhattan bubble once had such universal appeal. or maybe my idea of universal appeal has changed. I loved it as a kid and still do. the author was queer and described harriet as a “nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.” so there's that. all the characters were boomers, who knows what they would be like now.

This one seemed more like a deconstruction of mystery novels than a simple mystery novel. Both the crime and Poirot's solution are elaborately performative. what i found most interesting was Christie's portrayal of male characters in relation to her female characters and her grab bag of gender archetypes in general.

Hard to fathom how we went from this to Frankenberry.

"I just have one more ingredient..."