The Great Pumpkin

I don’t usually count page numbers in a book when I choose it. But yesterday, after toting Middlemarch to work and back for a few days, I started wondering just how big a bite I’d taken. Peeking to the back confirmed things. At 800 pages, it’s the heifer of the year, but instantly rewarding. Only [...]

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Mister Pip

There are those people for each of us, acknowledged or not, whose influence runs so deeply and purely that we strive to become a bit of whom they are. That’s a bad sentence, but it’s late and I’m having trouble hammering out thoughts on this novel without getting too close to an emotional precipice that [...]

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Title shopping

Well, well, well, there’s life in the old volume yet. The Trick is to Keep Breathing became somewhat interesting today on lunch hour. And just in time, as I was giving it a few more pages, then the old heave ho. As always happens when I’m into a book that is not really holding court, [...]

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The Trick is to Keep Breathing

All week I’ve struggled to get past the first few pages of Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing. As someone who is ordinarily attuned to the emotional states of women, and frankly drawn towards individuals who play to the dark side, I’m still at a loss here. Almost sixty pages in and the [...]

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Rough going

Goodness. I began the year with renewed enthusiasm for the TBR stack and energy to burn. Then the midwinter blahs struck and it feels as though I’m treading water in a large tub with no ladder. With the exception of No Country for Old Men, the past few weeks have been slow going. Tree of [...]

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