Margaret’s Comments (group member since Jan 03, 2016)

Margaret’s comments from the NHCPL Reads group.

Finally got ahold of Dana Stabenow's latest Kate Shugak novel, Less than a Treason.
Ooooooohhh.

Currently I'm fascinated by Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing -- perfect for book or number geeks!

I just finished listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day (audiobook narrated by the author). This was interesting, because some of the pieces had been recorded in the studio, but others were recorded while Mr. Sedaris was reading for a live audience. l am interested by the fact that I found the live-audience pieces much funnier; the delivery was that much better, both in timing and in expression. This reinforces my respect for the truly excellent studio narrators -- it's HARD to remain engaging without the interaction provided by an audience.

I'm working on a top-line bingo--so far I've read a book from the New shelf (32 Yolks, a memoir by chef Eric Rupert) and a book with a number in the title (Starter for Ten by David Nicholls).

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

I just finished The Madwoman Upstairs, a first novel by Catherine Lowell. Samantha Whipple, the last surviving collateral descendant of the Bronte family, is a student at Old College, Oxford and is trying to unravel her father's mysterious bequest of "The Warnings of Experience." I ended up feeling that the novel never quiet made up its mind whether it wanted to be a romantic-suspense novel (which it did pretty well) or to say Something Significant about the ways books, writers, and readers affect each other. Probably the intent was some of both, and it's interesting that I'm wondering about this considering all the arguments Samantha and her "smoking hot" tutor have over the question of whether or not authorial intent is a valid consideration in the analysis of literature.
At any rate, this is a good quick read which would be especially interesting to fans of the Brontes or of fiction set in academia.

I'm very much enjoying Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe. SUCH fun! Did you know that Finnish has two sets of vowels and all the vowels in any given word have to be from one set or the other? Do you know how the school system in Luxembourg ensures that students are trilingual when they graduate? Great fun for word-fans!

I just finished The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev. While I didn't enjoy the romance part of the plot quite as much as the author's first books, A Bollywood Affair, I loved all the details of how traditions from India are followed in present-day families in the U.S.

For anyone considering this challenge -- or just browsing the list -- I could not recommend Briar Rose more highly. A fairy tale plot recast as a Holocaust story? Yes, and also a book with a lot to say about the nature and power of storytelling and its influence on our lives. It took Jane Yolen, an accomplished oral storyteller as well as a polymath of literary genres, to create this book.

I'm almost finished with Divergent, for the "Read a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel" element in the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge. I hadn't read it when it came out because at that time I was still getting over the Hunger Games trilogy, but I have to say that this one does hold its own. And Four is a bunch more attractive than Peeta. ;-)

I chose 100 books for my Goodreads challenge last year and am doing the same this year. I elect not to count picture books or re-reads of books I have read before as part of the total, mainly because I'll be doing that a lot anyway and don't have the same need to see whether I'm "on track."