For the last five weeks, my grandfather has been in and out of the hospital. He’s 85-years-old, but up until the last month he’d been in relatively good health, still out working on projects in his yard and reading books that I would recommend. But five weeks ago (really, longer, it’s hard to tell when things started going awry), he became very weak, started falling frequently, and became more and more confused.
Book Review
Two Sentence Summary: All history is a story; this is a history of modern womanhood told through the story of her shoes.
One Sentence Review: Women From the Ankle Down is a fun way to look at modern womanhood, even if the author reaches a bit the closer she gets to modern America.
One Sentence Summary: Budding journalist Iris Dupont tries to take down a secret society at her New England prep school while investigating a mysterious science teacher and an incident from the past still making waves today.
One Sentence Review: The Year of the Gadfly is a book that appealed to all of my literary weak spots that managed to surprise me with every turn of the page.
The twelve days of disaster that gave birth to modern Chicago started with a blimp crash. A crew from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company were testing one of their new airships, Wingfoot Express, with a well-publicized flight over downtown Chicago. But just minutes into the flight, the blimp caught on fire, plunging through the glass ceiling of a bank near Grant Park. And that wouldn’t nearly be the end of it. In the next two weeks, the citizens of Chicago would be shaken by a race riot, a transit strike, and a shocking child murder.
One Sentence Summary: Human beings love stories… but why?
One Sentence Review: The Storytelling Animal makes a solid case of the evolutionary necessity of fiction, but seems to smooth out some of the complexity of the science exploring storytelling.
One Sentence Summary: In fourth grade, Alice Ozma and her father made a promise to read together every night for 100 nights; 3,218 nights later, The Streak finally ended.
One Sentence Review: Although The Reading Promise is, ostensibly, a memoir about books, it’s really more of of a series of essays about how a daughter and her father bonded over a shared love of reading.
Two Sentence Summary: A small town’s wayward daughter returns home in disgrace, only to discover the story she’s always been told about her absent father is a lie. As she digs into her hometown’s past, the young woman uncovers many dark secrets.
Two Sentence Review: I thought The Monsters of Templeton was totally and absolutely delightful. I’m becoming addicted to literary mysteries.
Indiana Jones/Hannibal Lecter of the illegal bug smuggling world.
Analogy Review: The Orchid Thief : The Wire :: Winged Obsession : White Collar
One Sentence Summary: A summer in the city chaperoning a wayward teenage starlet becomes the opportunity for a 36-year-old woman to have her own coming-of-age story.
One Sentence Review: The Chaperone sticks out to me because of the unexpected protagonist, an everywoman who learns to push convention in small ways and find what she wants in her life.
At the end of 2011, I stole an idea from Lu (Regular Rumination) to write super-short reviews for books that I hadn’t written full reviews about. I liked that idea so much, that I’m going to try to keep it up this year and do some summary posts of short reviews every three months. These are books that, for whatever reason, I didn’t feel like writing full reviews for but still wanted to at least mention.
