Books

Book 526: The Season – Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer

This might be the book to have pulled me out of my reading slump! Even if it’s not, I really enjoyed it as visible by my starting it at 8:30pm and finishing it the same night at 12:45am.

I stumbled across this book catching up on blog posts when I saw A.M.B.’s post Five Variations of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice on her blog The Misfortune of Knowing. We all know I love Jane, her birthday is on my calendar – seriously, and I have an entire page dedicated to her here: Austen(esque). So of course, I immediately went to put all of them on hold at my various libraries and this one was available immediately!!

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ARC, Books

Book 515: The Address – Fiona Davis

Having finally cleared my backlog of ARCs I may have gone overboard accepting and requesting them in July. I received six unsolicited requests (some from publishers I’ve worked with) and I requested an additional four. Of all of those I received four, including this one.*

When the publisher reached out to me about this book I was intrigued by 1880s New York and the fact it was about a woman running an apartment building. I figured this is historical fiction, but pretty progressive historical fiction so why not give it a go. What I didn’t realize, because I didn’t re-read the blurb before I started it was that there is a time and narrator shift of 100 years that caught me off guard.

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Books

Book 509: The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

You’re welcome in advance for my not just writing “What a load of horse-shit.” However, as you read keep in mind that’s pretty much what I’m thinking. I’ll try to write something a bit more PC, but I’m not sure how successful I will be.

I picked up a copy of this a little over four years ago and who knows why I did this. I’m sure part of it was just that The Communist Manifesto is one of those books/works that EVERYONE has heard of but that so few have actually read, especially outside of a history course. For me though this book didn’t feel like it was meant to be read, it felt like it should have been an incredibly long and boring speech given at some sort of rally. Basically you’d be incredibly energized at the very beginning, fall asleep in the middle and then energized again at the end.

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ARC, Books

Book 502: Jane Austen, the Secret Radical – Helena Kelly

Perhaps I’m too smart for my own good, but overall this book was a bit disappointing. With a title like Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, you’d expect there to be revelations of sorts and yet there weren’t. I mean that’s why I requested a copy from the publisher.* I was hoping as the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death rapidly approaches there’d be something completely new and innovative to talk about, but there wasn’t.

Sure Kelly highlighted a few things that I missed when reading Austen, but really she just expounded upon the things that those of us who don’t read Austen ONLY as a romance novelist, but as a social commentator hopefully picked up on. She provided more detail of course, especially when it came to names and places, but overall there just weren’t a lot of revelations.

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Books

Book 500: Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings – Jane Austen

You read that right, Book 500.

I purposefully held off reading this edition for over a year because I knew I wanted something special for my 500th book on The Oddness of Moving Things. Tim got me the whole boxed collection of Austen’s works in December of 2015. I didn’t think it would take quite this long to get to, but with my whirlwind year at my previous job I’m not really surprised at this point. I’m reading again and I’m glad I saved this one for my 500th book!

I know others in the book blogosphere have reviewed this collection of Austen’s juvenilia and they’ve probably done it better. I’m a bit blinded by Austen because I’m such a fan boy (read my 2013 response to Pride and Prejudice or just check out the page dedicated to Austen if you don’t believe me—or if you haven’t been around a while). I’m going to talk a bit about this work and the collection and then I’m going to have a brief bitch session about the physical book itself so fair warning.

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