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"Bookish" - 5 new articles
Someone - by Alice McDermottI like Alice McDermott's work. But this one never really engaged me. I don't know why.
It is the story of Marie Commeford, a life in glimpses. Somewhere in the middle she says she wants to find someone who will love her. Perhaps this is the "someone" of the title, but more likely it is Marie herself, an ordinary person who is still "someone". Perhaps we all want that more than anything else:
    Middlesex, by Jeffrey EugenidesYou could call this a different kind of coming-of-age novel. Or a historical novel. Or whatever Mendel's Dwarf is called. Curiously, my copy of Mendel's Dwarf was classified as a "romance" by the library it came from. I don't think this is the right category, although both books do involve romance.
Calliope Helen Stephanides was born twice, you'll read in the first line of the book. Cally was
City of Bones, by Michael ConnellyOne of Connelly's best.
Harry Bosch is sent out to see a bone unearthed by a citizen's dog. The discovery leads to the remains of a twelve-year-old boy, at least 20 years old, in the hillsides of the Santa Monica mountains.
As with all cases, Harry is impatient and wants to find the apparent killer immediately. He works night and day to identify the body,then track down possible suspects. In
Bone by Bone, by Peter MatthiessenThere is a lot to recommend this book. It provides remarkable pictures of the US, in particular Florida, during the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. It provides one way to view the world of E.J. Watson, a legendary character in Florida in that time. It offers a bit of a cautionary tale about ecology, albeit in the background. Yet for me its story of Watson was almost relentlessly awful.
Atonement, by Ian McEwanI finally got around to reading this. I saw the movie version a few years ago and loved it. I remembered it perhaps too well, so wondered if I would enjoy the book, knowing the ending.
It really is very different. The book is long - 480 pages in my paperback version - so covers a great deal more ground.
As in the film, the book essentially starts out with 13-year-old Briony Tallis viewing, by
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