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Room
Room by Emma Donoghue Published: 2010 Length: 321 pages This story follows a young boy, Jack, and his mother as they live their lives trapped in a small room. Jack was born there, and in his five years of life he has never seen the world beyond the locked door. Emma Donoghue was inspired by the horrifying events in the 2008 Josef Fritzl abduction case, in which a man in Austria locked his daughter in his basement and abused her for twenty-four years. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything. I enjoyed this so much more than I…
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Alas, Babylon
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank Published: 1959 Narrated by: Will Patton Length: 11:14 (323 pages) I keep hearing that dystopian and apocalyptic fiction has saturated the book market in the last few years, but I feel like these disaster scenarios have always been popular, really hitting their stride in the mid-twentieth century. A few of my favorites that come to mind (The Day of the Triffids, Earth Abides, and I Am Legend for example) all come from the 40s and 50s. What I love most about the apocalyptic stories from that era, at least from my limited sampling, is that the reader often gets to experience the disaster happen, and…
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The Classics Club – Round Two!
I’ve decided to join The Classics Club for another round. That’s another fifty classic novels read in the next five years, with a completion date of April 12th, 2022 (starting a few days back to include my current read). This is just a tentative list. I like to read on a whim, so it will change dramatically by the time I’m finished, as the previous list did. I don’t understand how people follow TBR lists that span a month, let alone five years, so I’m not even going to try. But this is what I would currently like to read, having scanned my shelves and Audible wishlist. I would like…
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The Double
The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Published: 1846 Translated By: Jessie Coulson (from Russian in 1972) Length: 144 pages Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a government clerk, a faceless bureaucrat, who is struggling both in work and in his social life. After a particularly emotional encounter at a party, while walking home through a cold night’s fog, he finds himself face to face with his double, a man identical in look, background, and even name. At first, they becomes friends. Golyadkin even shares his home with him, but before soon his doppelgänger begins to take over his life. Golyadkin is awkward with people, but this double is charismatic and popular. Golyadkin isn’t…
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His Bloody Project
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet Published: 2015 Narrated by: Antony Ferguson Length: 10:22 (280 pages) It’s 1869 and Roderick Macrae, a young man from the Scottish highland village of Culduie, is being held in jail after a gruesome murder. He’s a smart young man, shy and insightful, and he never denies committing the act. The question is what drove him to do it. This is a novel composed of found footage, essentially. First we’re shown police statements taken from the residents of Culduie, some praising Roderick as a wonderful kid and others calling him a animal-abusing lunatic. The story ends with a transcript of the trial and various…
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March in Review
Books Acquired: None. Books Read: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank Room by Emma Donoghue Company Town by Madeline Ashby Not a single book bought or stolen or conjured up this month. My favourite used book sale is only about five weeks away now, so I’m saving myself for that. We have limited shelf space left here, and we usually both go a bit nuts at that sale. It’s been a fairly busy (but also lazy) month, and as a result I’ve fallen quite behind on these posts. I haven’t written about a single novel that I read in…
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The Classics Club: Completed!
Five years ago, I decided to join an online challenge called The Classics Club, the goal of which was to read fifty classic novels in a five-year period. For the purposes of this list, I defined a classic as any book written mid-century or earlier. I always enjoyed reading classics in school, but I went almost my entire twenties without reading anything older than a decade or two, outside of university assignments. I didn’t really expect to finish this, or even still be blogging by this time, but here we are. I actually read the fiftieth book about half a year ago, but I decided to carry on to the…
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Ex Libris
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Published: 2000 Length: 162 pages I love books about books, but this is probably the first time I’ve read one so purely about the love of reading. Ex Libris is a collection of essays about the reading, storing, and sharing of books, something I imagine many people would find incredibly dull, but I love it. If you’re someone who spends their spare time reading book blogs, you probably will too. It begins with one of my favourite essays, Marrying Libraries, which recounts the compromises and sacrifices that go into the merging of two personal libraries. The bookshelves in the Loose…
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Gourmet Rhapsody
Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery Published: 2000 Narrated by: Full cast Translated By: Alison Anderson (from French in 2009) Length: 04:03 (160 pages) A renown Parisian food critic, the greatest alive, is on his deathbed. He’s lived a life of eating, where food mattered more than the people around him, and in his last hours he strives to find comfort in that passion by tracing his memories back to the truest taste of his life, in an attempt to experience it again before he’s gone. This is presented as a series of vignettes, short scenes from his life. Half of the chapters are from his point of view as he…
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Sleeping Giants
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel Published: 2016 Narrated by: full cast Series: Themis Files #1 Length: 08:28 (304 pages) A young girl falls through the earth and lands cradled in a giant metallic hand. Seventeen years later, that woman is now a brilliant physicist leading a research team to discover the mystery behind the discovery. When they find another body part buried in another area of the world, there’s a new goal: to reconstruct. I really enjoyed this. It’s written as a series of interviews, similar to World War Z, except the interviews take place as the story progresses rather than looking back afterwards. Some chapters are solo journal entries…