Note to Mary: If the next book recommended by you that I read has even one person dying in it, I'm going to consider this a trend.
To everyone else: Remember how I read this book and I was all, "suddenly everyone and his sister wants to kill someone else"? Well, even if they had, there still wouldn't be as many deaths as happen in this book! But, luckily, these deaths aren't quite so graphic as Zola's.
Basically what happens in this book is that there's a missionary called Celanire who shows up at a village in Africa conveniently soon (practically immediately after) the death of the man she was meant to work for, so she gets his job of running a home for "half-castes" — basically biracial children whose parent(s) don't want that transgression running around underfoot. Celanire does awesome things with the home and also starts empowering women and also starts making moves on pretty much every sentient being in the town. There's more to Celanire than meets the eye, which we find out in bits and pieces as we follow her from the Ivory Coast to Guadeloupe to Peru on her quest to set right some old wrongs.
It's not really a page-turner, as they say, but Condé kept me interested in the book's big questions: Who is this Celanire? Who slashed her throat, and why? What kind of person would allow that to happen? Just how exactly does karma feel when it comes back to bite you? How much weird shit can Celanire get away with?
Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Guadeloupe)
Showing posts with label gothic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gothic. Show all posts
30 March 2009
Audiobook Round-up
I got back last night from a week-long camping trip in Alabama, which was awesome. Less awesome is all the internet catching-up I have to do!
Because of the twelve-hour drive, I decided to collect a bunch of audiobooks from the library's fancy-pants online trove of such things. Scott loves them, but I'd never given them a real try. Now I have, and... well. I was right — I can't focus on an audiobook to save my life. So. No ratings (or even decent reviews) for these until I read them proper, but here's the list of things I listened to in the car last week.
Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
This is a 1988 collection of Barry's columns, which shows in all his talk about Reagan as president! I like Barry, so I enjoyed listening to this hour-long book while I tried to stay awake (we left home at 6am!). Bonus points for having John Ritter as a narrator.
More of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
I can't seem to find this listed anywhere but fancy-pants online troves of audiobooks, so this is possibly audiobook-only. Unsure. Anyway, this is the 1996 collection of awesome columns. Still entertaining. Still narrated by John Ritter. Still capable of keeping me awake, if not listening properly.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (28 March — 29 March)
I knew the general idea going in, of course — Dorian Gray has a painting that ages while he stays young. That turns out to be a gross over-simplification of this novel, which deals with heavy themes of morality and ethics and deception. Grey likes his painting at the beginning, but as it ages and the bad things he's done show up in it he comes to loathe it. And his loathing of it has him doing even more bad things that show up in it. And all the while he has an angel-friend telling him how good he is, and a devil-friend spouting off ridiculous (even to him) notions of how the world works. I definitely enjoyed this book, but I will have to go back and read it to pick up on the hour or two I missed of it!
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)
Because of the twelve-hour drive, I decided to collect a bunch of audiobooks from the library's fancy-pants online trove of such things. Scott loves them, but I'd never given them a real try. Now I have, and... well. I was right — I can't focus on an audiobook to save my life. So. No ratings (or even decent reviews) for these until I read them proper, but here's the list of things I listened to in the car last week.
Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
This is a 1988 collection of Barry's columns, which shows in all his talk about Reagan as president! I like Barry, so I enjoyed listening to this hour-long book while I tried to stay awake (we left home at 6am!). Bonus points for having John Ritter as a narrator.
More of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
I can't seem to find this listed anywhere but fancy-pants online troves of audiobooks, so this is possibly audiobook-only. Unsure. Anyway, this is the 1996 collection of awesome columns. Still entertaining. Still narrated by John Ritter. Still capable of keeping me awake, if not listening properly.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (28 March — 29 March)
I knew the general idea going in, of course — Dorian Gray has a painting that ages while he stays young. That turns out to be a gross over-simplification of this novel, which deals with heavy themes of morality and ethics and deception. Grey likes his painting at the beginning, but as it ages and the bad things he's done show up in it he comes to loathe it. And his loathing of it has him doing even more bad things that show up in it. And all the while he has an angel-friend telling him how good he is, and a devil-friend spouting off ridiculous (even to him) notions of how the world works. I definitely enjoyed this book, but I will have to go back and read it to pick up on the hour or two I missed of it!
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)
31 October 2008
The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (25 October — 29 October)
One last book for the RIP Challenge before it ends! This one was on my original list, but I didn't think it was going to make it here in time for Hallowe'en. Luckily, it did, and I quite enjoyed it, though I thought it was going to be more scary than gothic. Alas.
The Thirteenth Tale is two stories — the main story is that of Vida Winter, a prolific author à la Stephen King or Jodi Picoult, who is dying and wants to tell someone her true life story. The second is that of Margaret Lea, the woman Vida chooses to be her biographer, who is slowly coming to terms with the secret of her twin lost at birth.
The secondary plotline I don't care for much, but Vida Winter's tale is incredibly engaging. Born into an incredibly dysfunctional family, she learns to cope with a lot of insanity and hide a few dozen secrets in the process.
I recommend this book for Vida's story alone; even though I figured out the twist halfway through I still didn't know how they'd pull it off. Well told, Setterfield.
Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)
The Thirteenth Tale is two stories — the main story is that of Vida Winter, a prolific author à la Stephen King or Jodi Picoult, who is dying and wants to tell someone her true life story. The second is that of Margaret Lea, the woman Vida chooses to be her biographer, who is slowly coming to terms with the secret of her twin lost at birth.
The secondary plotline I don't care for much, but Vida Winter's tale is incredibly engaging. Born into an incredibly dysfunctional family, she learns to cope with a lot of insanity and hide a few dozen secrets in the process.
I recommend this book for Vida's story alone; even though I figured out the twist halfway through I still didn't know how they'd pull it off. Well told, Setterfield.
Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)
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