Various Pets Alive and Dead: Marina Lewycka

Review by Joannah CabornPublished by Penguin, 2012 One of the best things about this book are the dedications. The first one: “To quietly flowing Don”. The second is a Gogol quote, from Dead Souls (1842): “We live in new times – the age of the hero is past – now is the time of the …

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The Black Sheep: Honoré de Balzac

Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian The Black Sheep  (La Rabouilleuse)  Tr. Donald Adamson  More than forty-five years have passed between my first acquaintance with Balzac and this renewal.  Of that first work I read (Pere Goriot) I carry a strong impression, mainly of the atmosphere. Had I not read Balzac then, I guess I would never …

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Reading challenge!

My dear reading compatriots: I would like to propose something of a challenge. While I don't know the range of linguistic abilities among us, having never met the majority of you, I wonder if it would be possible for us as a group to undertake the same sort of challenge as BBC's Ann Morgan. Would …

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Charles Dickens—A Life: Claire Tomalin

Review by Abbas Hassan This is a very readable and sweeping account of Charles Dickens' life. What I found striking about the book was that it presented a very lucid, chatty narrative with trivia about all the books he wrote, the friends he kept (and did not), his habits, his weaknesses, his motivations, his marriage …

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Nickle and Dimed—Undercover in Low-Wage USA: Barbara Ehrenreich

The America of mimimum wage workers is not one that gets a lot of attention in the media. To quote Polly Toynbee’s introduction to this book, it is “a secret continent”. “The barely reported truth about the American dream is that it exists in a country of widespread, growing and inescapable poverty, where the essential …

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Snake Ropes: Jess Richards

Published by Sceptre This is a strange and beautifully written tale told by two young women, Mary and Morgan. Mary lives in a community on an island where the islanders trade with the “tall men” who come from the mainland. Boys on the island start to disappear, and Mary suspects the tall men. One day, …

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We Have Never Been Well-Read: Franco Moretti’s Pact with the Devil

This is a useful excerpt from the article you can access via the link below. New ground is better than common ground: not “I haven’t read that yet—let’s discuss something else” but rather “I may never read that, so tell me about it, it sounds interesting.” http://quarterlyconversation.com/we-have-never-been-well-read-franco-morettis-pact-with-the-devil Having now read Andrew Seal's (high-brow and apt to …

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Atwood, again and again

Review by Usha Raman I encountered Margaret Atwood first in a dusty, old edition of The Handmaid's Tale, a dark and disturbing view of a dystopic future in which reproductive rights and rights of association are nonexistent. I moved on to The Robber Bride, also somewhat dark but not without touches of humour. There are …

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Ultimatum: Matthew Glass

This is in response to Lulu’s review of The Twelfth Imam, which she said was her first political thriller and seems to have been quite disappointing. Try this one. The book is set in the near future. Because global warming has made sea levels rise, several countries are having to relocate populations in threatened areas …

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