Skip to main content

Sunday Salon and some giveaway winners


Is it really Sunday again? Hard to believe that another week has flown by. It’s a quiet day today, but my dad has football going full-force, and my parents are celebrating their 34th anniversary today!

In reading, this week I’ve completed:
The King’s Mistress, by Emma Campion
The Lady Queen, by Nancy Goldstone

Currently I’m struggling through AS Byatt’s new book, coming out at the beginning of next month:The Children's Book. It’s very hard to connect with any of the characters, plus the author describes every. Single. Little. Thing. I really want to like AS Byatt’s books (I’m the only person I’ve ever met who was lukewarm about Possession), but I find it very hard to like them. Do you have an author like that, where you keep reading their work, hoping to like them—but just not?

Also, I forgot to choose winners for my two-week-old context for Michelle Moran’s Cleopatra’s Daughter… so they are:

Irene Yeates
Scapettajunkie
Melissa at Shhh I’m Reading

Please e-mail me with your mailing addresses, and I’ll get the books out to you right away. Coming up this week I have some reviews scheduled, plus I'll have another giveaway (and I promise I won't be such a flake about it!
Labels:

Comments

Kristen M. said…
You're not the only one ... I didn't even get through a quarter of Possession before I gave up. I just didn't feel that it had any rhythm to it. I may try it again in the future but then I may not. And it kind of turned me off to Byatt altogether.
September 21, 2009 at 12:04 AM
Marg said…
I haven't even tried. It doesn't really even interest me that much despite the rave reviews that the book seems to get all the time.
September 21, 2009 at 4:28 AM
Anonymous said…
Actually, I'm with you on Possession. My entire book club felt pretty lukewarm about it. We appreciated it more once we discussed it and dug a bit deeper into the book, but I'm still not feeling compelled to pick up another Byatt book.
September 21, 2009 at 7:36 AM
Susan said…
I started Possession in the spring, and i still haven't finished it! I enjoyed the student university rivalry, but I know what you mean about her characters seeming distant and cold - that's my problem with Possession, too. I'm halfway through, and reading it mostly because this part is set in Yorkshire, where I lived for a year! The story is interesting, but it takes so LONG to get anywhere.
September 23, 2009 at 9:57 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.
194 comments
Read more

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...
115 comments
Read more

Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

The Piano Teacher is a complicated novel. On the surface, it’s about a love affair between two British ex-patriots in Hong Kong in 1952-3. Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong with her husband Martin at a time when the world is still recovering from WWII; Claire takes up work as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, where she meets Will Truesdale, the Chens’ enigmatic chauffeur. The book jumps back in time between the 1950s and the beginning of WWII, when Will is interned in Stanley, a Hong Kong camp for enemies of Japan. On “the outside” is Tudy Liang, Will’s beautiful Eurasian lover. There’s no doubt that Lee’s writing is beautiful. But there’s something lacking in this short, terse novel that I can’t quite put my finger on. First, I think it’s the tenses she uses when taking about each story: that which is set in the 1950s is in the past tense, while the war scenes are talked about in the present tense (confusing, no?) The interpersonal relationships of the m...
12 comments
Read more