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Annabelle Dhont _nnabelle_ — I tried to read this when it first came out and for some reason it just didn't click but this time I tore right through it. The plot is very good, not brilliant but certainly moves the story along at a nice clip. It's the descriptions of India that are extraordinary, mouthwatering even (mmm, the food: I am totally having puri, chapatis and curry this week); mostly the imagery is delicious, but when she wants to gross you out, the author is also vurrry good at that. Laurie King is very insightful. For instance, she describes one of those epic Indian feasts you see in movies like Indiana Jones, but she makes it clear that the host of this particular feast is using all this food (much of it disgusting) to put himself subtly in a position of power over his Western guests. It's fascinating passive-aggressive behavior; and it seems so obvious once she points it out. Also, as in all the books in this series, she creates a perfect wife for Sherlock Holmes — and I'm not normally enthusiastic about "fan fiction," even at high literary levels. King is the only author who really writes enjoyable post-Conan Doyle stories with Holmes. And his young bride, in this series, has so many interesting contrary views to those of her husband; she is his conscience, his feminine side, without being a bore about it. This is a totally great book. I don't know how men would like it, but as a female fan of Holmes, I highly recommend it.

Pedro Noronha pedronoronb2ea — Life in the early 60’s in Mississippi, for those of affluence and prestige, was one of country clubs and parties, benefits and shopping, dinners and socializing. But for some segments of society, namely black maids, it was a life of servitude and poverty, of fear and humiliation, of barely surviving and having no hope. But circumstances were about to change, because of the inspiration of a newly graduated journalist, and the bravery of a handful of maids who wanted to tell their stories. This novel will grab your heart and twist it, as you realize how these women suffered just to survive. Kathryn Stockett’s descriptive prose and intricate plot as well as memorable characters make this novel a great read, and one you won’t ever forget.

Rakel Hinriksdottir rakelhinriks — This book is a fairly comprehensive (610 pages) history of World War II trying to make some new interpretations and make use of some more recent archival materials. It is a quick read and engaging, even if you already have read a lot about WWII. What I liked the most about this book was that the author takes a clear perspective - namely that Germany (Hitler) largely lost the war because of several egregious errors (invading USSR, declaring war on the US, etc.) and this had these mistakes been avoided, the war could have been much longer and might even have been won by the Axis powers. I am always suspicious of such revisionist efforts, but this is a moderate one. For example, many of Hitler's worst errors were caused by his ideology, which also provided the basis for his early successes, so the ultimate outcomes would likely not have changed that much. Roberts also provides discussions of decision making approaches that were more or less successful (hint - committee rather than autocratic decision making receives good grades). Finally, Roberts also provides useful detail on battles, campaigns, and generals that do not receive enough attention in more popular histories, for example, the Battle of Kursk in the Russian war and the role of General William Slim in the British campaign against the Japanese in Burma. Overall a very fine book.

Lamiaa Hassan lamiaa82 — Oh David. I miss you with a plangency that belies the fact that I never met you, never would have. You were and are and will always be such a serious force in my life. I've read this two or three times, and a few weeks after DFW died I picked it up again, almost on a whim. I'd been having trouble finding something to sink my teeth into—I rejected Anna Kavan, William Vollmann, and Fellipe Alfau in short order—and I kind of pulled this book without thinking about the timing, refusing to consider myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read all his books before, right? So I should be able to revisit them whenever I want, without feeling like a scenester wannabe. I didn't remember much about this one, except a weird snippet about playing tennis in a tornado. So try to picture my shock, in the early pages of the very first essay, when I came upon this: On board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. Cut to me, hair blowing crazy in the wind outside my apartment, with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face. So, you know, I don't know what to say. It really was very hard for me to get through this reading without feeling like a stupid bandwagon-jumper. It really was very hard not to notice all the despair slyly threaded throughout these essays, intermixed with the jokes, the seriousness, the brilliance. But even while doing all that noticing, I kept second-guessing and scolding myself for overemphasizing something that only now seems true, in retrospect. I mean, if he'd come out of the closet recently instead, everyone would be piecing together "clues" from his oeuvre about his homosexual tendencies, you know? I'm having trouble explaining this, but I guess I have a serious problem with how the soul-baring-ness of the autobiographical writer leads to this tacit agreement that readers can poke their noses "between the lines" to figure out more than the writer is telling. But then WTF, these things are actually there! Right? I just kept looping myself around and around, not feeling comfortable with anything I thought about anything. So whatever. This book is ungodly fantastic, the fact that he is gone is so goddamn devastating, the whole thing is beautiful-awful but mostly just fucking awful. If anyone is still reading or cares, here are some thoughts on the individual essays. The title essay and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" are spectacular. Hilarious too, which is something we sometimes forget about DFW, given how super serious & intellectual he is. In "Greatly Exaggerated" he is so fucking smart that I couldn't even read the essay, because I am not, and never will be, his intellectual equal. "E Unibus Pluram," on the other hand, was incredibly smart but also (for the most part) accessible to us mere mortals, and was incredibly interesting, if sadly a bit dated. "David Lynch Keeps His Head" was a nice middle ground: incredibly obsessive-nerd-y, but it made me desperately want to watch Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks again. I only read about half of the Michael Joyce essay because my attention span for tennis (especially its accompanying statistics and arcana) is pretty short. "Derivative Sports in Tornado Alley" was plaintive and sad and the most 'personal' (maybe?!?!?!) of the essays, and though it was the one that stuck with me the most on my first read of this book, this time I think the images of the bovine herds of fat sweaty Mid-Easterners stuffing their faces with funnel cake and hot dogs at the State Fair will remain in my head for a long while. God I am so depressed.