![]() ![]() ![]() As the boys make a perilous journey south, they'll come face to face with a world torn apart and society in ruins. Jamie takes him in, and as Andrew heals and they eventually step out into the strange new world, their relationship starts to feel like more than just friendship. something that stops Jamie in his tracks. Life is dangerous now and, armed with a gun, Jamie goes to pull the trigger. ![]() When the Superflu wipes out most of the population, Jamie finds himself completely alone in a cabin in the woods - until an injured stranger crosses his path. A queer romance about courage, hope and humanity for fans of They Both Die at the End, The Hunger Games and Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda. They don't know what they'll find on their dangerous journey. Jamie and Andrew are strangers, but they're two of the last people left alive. ![]()
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![]() “I was writing about reading Austen in a personal way that a lot of the writing I’ve done hasn’t been,” Cohen said. Austen’s writing becomes a guide for Cohen’s reflections in the wake of her father’s passing and, after the births of her two children, as she looks toward the future. ![]() ![]() In her new book Austen Years, Cohen writes of life and reading from the perspective of a memoirist and through the lens of literary criticism. For several years, she read almost nothing else. However, during a period of her life shaped by the illness and death of her father, Cohen found herself drawn to Austen’s books. An essayist who teaches English and creative writing at the University of Chicago, her work explores more recent authors such as James Baldwin, and time periods such as the Gilded Age and Civil Rights Era. Rachel Cohen had never thought of herself as a Jane Austenite. ![]() ![]() ![]() This book introduces two new characters to the mix: Hannah, a 19 year conservative mom and Iona, a creative poetry loving mom. It's amazing how we can know their personalities just through their forum post, chats, emails and IMs. I nearly died with laughter throughout this book. I knew that this was going to be toughest stretch of the Read-a-thon so I went with something I knew was going to keep me awake due to laughing. I read this book during the 24 Hour Readathon during the 3-5am hour. This is probably my absolute favorite set of books to read. ![]() I was so excited when I heard there was going to be a third book in the series. It's never a dull moment being a SAHM!If you have been a loyal reader of this blog from the beginning, then you know what a HUGE fan I am of Meredith Efken's SAHM series. To top it off, the group decides they are going to meet for the first time at a get together. This time the group faces issues such as grad school advisors that won't help, dealing with adoptive children who have emotional problems, being a working mom and having a stay at home husband and trying to find out what the perfect birthday party is. New to the group are Iona and Hannah, both with personalities that take the group by surprise. Joining her are the rest of the SAHM group including Dulcie, Zelia, Jocelyn, Paige, etc. It's time to rejoin the SAHM email group and it looks like Rosalyn is back in charge but as a changed person! Instead of her former condescending self, a new women who is trying to be a better person is back. ![]() ![]() ![]() This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny. But then, my experiences are ordinary, as ordinary as the everyday horrors suffered by the book's protagonist, Jiyoung. Her final chapter, "2016," written as Jiyoung's therapist's report-his claims of being "aware" and "enlightened" only damning him further as an entitled troll-proves to be narrative genius.", laid bare my own Korean childhood - and, let's face it, my Western adulthood too - forcing me to confront traumatic experiences that I'd tried to chalk up as nothing out of the ordinary. Cho's matter-of-fact delivery underscores the pervasive gender imbalance, while just containing the empathic rage. ![]() Cho's narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry (complete with statistics-heavy footnotes). ![]() ![]() "Already an international best-seller, television scriptwriter Cho's debut novel has been credited with helping to 'launch Korea's new feminist movement.' The fact that gender inequity is insidiously pervasive throughout the world will guarantee that this tale has immediate resonance, and its smoothly accessible, albeit British English vernacular-inclined, translation by award-winning translator Chang will ensure appreciative Anglophone audiences. ![]() ![]() The title, Dead Souls, must be one of the most evocative titles ever. I admire the way in which Maguire has kept his own brilliantly variegated vocabulary away from 20th-century phrases, without ever looking parodic or antiquarian. He is accompanied by his servant Petruska, who brought in with his greatcoat "a special odour all his own that had also been imparted to the next thing he brought in, a sack containing the sundries of a manservant's toilet". This is hard to assess in translation, but Robert Maguire has made a text which corresponds to Nabokov's excitement - from the moment when we meet Chichikov, "not overly fat, not overly thin" entering his room in a hostelry, "with cockroaches peeping out like prunes from every corner". Gogol also resembles Dickens in the way in which everything he started to imagine transformed itself and began to wriggle with life. Gogol called Dead Souls a "poem", and in some ways the English work it is nearest to is The Canterbury Tales, where rhyme and rhythm add to, even create, the satisfactory unexpectedness of the detail of people and things. ![]() Nabokov, in a great, dogmatic essay on it, saw the book as a phenomenon of a peculiar "life-generating syntax", in which Gogol's sentences called up a world which could be capriciously developed or abandoned. It could be described as a linguistic phantasmagoria - full of people and things with a hallucinatory reality that rushes into the surreal. ![]() ![]() ![]() The book ends abruptly after a discussion of the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress in 1915. Starting with his birth and parentage, Gandhi has given reminiscences of childhood, child marriage, relation with his wife and parents, experiences at the school, his study tour to London, efforts to be like the English gentleman, experiments in dietetics, his going to South Africa, his experiences of colour prejudice, his quest for dharma, social work in Africa, return to India, his slow and steady work for political awakening and social activities. In 1998, the book was designated as one of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century" by a committee of global spiritual and religious authorities. It was initiated at the insistence of Swami Anand and other close co-workers of Gandhi, who encouraged him to explain the background of his public campaigns. ![]() Its English translation also appeared in installments in his other journal Young India. ![]() It was written in weekly installments and published in his journal Navjivan from 1925 to 1929. ![]() 'Experiments of Truth or Autobiography') is the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, covering his life from early childhood through to 1921. The Story of My Experiments with Truth ( Gujarati: Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha, lit. ![]() ![]() The Sinclair clan attempt to maintain a façade of absolute perfection, but as Cady notes at the beginning of the novel, that image is built on lies and fantasy. ![]() The Sinclairs are an old New England family: Harris and Tipper have three daughters, Penny, Carrie, and Bess, each of whom has a large house on Beechwood island and an enormous inheritance. However, while Gat-who is South Asian and therefore an outsider in this Old New England family-is superficially welcomed into the family, it is clear that the budding romance between him and Cady creates tension among the Sinclairs, especially for the patriarch of the family, Harris. Gat is about the same age as Cady, Johnny, and Mirren, and the four become fast friends, calling themselves “the Liars” Cady and Gat also eventually fall in love and begin to spend more time alone together during their teenage years. Everything changes during Year Eight, however, as Cady’s aunt Carrie brings her boyfriend Ed and his nephew Gat. The summers of Cady’s childhood were uneventful, as she played with her two cousins, Johnny and Mirren. ![]() ![]() Eighteen-year-old Cady Eastman has spent nearly every summer of her life on the private island of Beechwood, near Martha’s Vineyard, along with the rest of the wealthy Sinclair family. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Hoang is sure-footed in her character development Michael and Stella both have robust, sympathetic stories and complicated, loving families. Michael is hesitant after a past experience with a stalker client, but he recognizes her vulnerability and is overcome by an instinct to protect her. ![]() Stella, both deeply attracted to him and grateful for his kindness, asks him to consider a long-term arrangement. At their first appointment, Michael refuses to rush into sex with a woman so frozen with discomfort, regardless of whether or not she’s paid him. Enter Michael Phan, a man as gorgeous as any K-drama star, who abandoned his promising career as a fashion designer and started escorting to pay for his mother’s cancer treatments. Stella has never enjoyed dating or sex, so when a male colleague she’s cautiously interested in rudely suggests she should “get some practice,” she takes his advice to heart. Stella Lane’s job as an econometrician is perfectly satisfying, but now that she’s 30, her mother expects her to look for a husband and start producing babies. A woman with Asperger’s falls in love with the escort she hires to teach her about sex and relationships. ![]() ![]() Compare Tevya, an American production made around the same time (1939) in Yiddish and depicting shtetl life in Eastern Europe. Starring Leon Liebgold, Lili Liliana, Abraham Morewski. ![]() (The names of the characters above are transliterated from Yiddish they may appear in other forms in different sources.) (It's been described as " Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist.") The rest of the community wants to get him out. At the wedding, Leye becomes possessed by Khonnen's spirit. Khonnen responds by studying the forbidden Kabbala and then drops dead in mystical ecstasy. ![]() But Leah's father is making her marry a rich man's son. The movie plot, in a nutshell: In a shtetl (pre-Holocaust Eastern European small town with a large Jewish population), Khonnen, a poor student, and Leah, a rich merchant's daughter, fall in love (their parents pledged that they would marry). The Dybbuk is a 1937 film from Poland, directed by Michal Waszynski. Leah, revealing that she has been possessed by Khonnen's dybbuk ![]() ![]() ![]() Hopefully one of the things this review can offer is a meaningful explanation of what the hell this book exactly is for anyone interested in it. ![]() The book’s content very much threw me for a curve ball I had zero clue going into it that I’d be getting a crash course on Freud. If that sounds like a bewildering discussion to read about, that’s because it is. To summarize this book’s content as concisely as possible: what The Birth and Death of Meaning delivers is a discussion of human nature through the lens of psychoanalysis that eventually explores the importance of existentialism to the social sciences. ![]() That’s mostly I think because it’s not easy to tell what the hell this book is about. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I started reading this book (I didn’t). ![]() |