![]() ![]() Then, one day, Elise is discovered stabbed to death in her bed and Anna and Tate are the prime suspects. Anna, her best friend - Elise, her boyfriend - Tate, as well as others, all go to party hard, get laid and have fun. It's about a teen summer vacation gone wrong. oh yeah, and there's that whole murder thing too. I use "YA" with some hesitation here because it's full of all the kinda stuff that will make some parents clutch their rosary beads - sex, alcohol abuse, drug use. So, what is this book? It's a mature YA mystery. ![]() It is a satisfying story from start to finish that took me through so many different emotions. The ending is fantastic but it doesn't matter because the book is also about so many other things. ![]() ![]() Haas does what, in my opinion, all good mystery writers should do: she doesn't hang everything precariously-balanced on her reveals. Dangerous Girls is one of those multi-layered books that does several different things at once and still manages to do each one equally well. It's in danger of being given a quick once over and then dismissed as something vapid, senseless and probably crap. So, thank you.ĭangerous Girls is in danger. You managed to take me straight out of this whole Goodreads censorship/deleting reviews fiasco and plant me right inside another time and place many brave books have tried and failed this past week to do what you have done. "Wouldn't we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?" ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The emotional and moral complexity that she uncovers in the characters of these resonant novellas confirms Jane Smiley's singular talent." -The Washington Post Book World "Ordinary Love & Good Willare unforgettable novellas, built on lucid characterizations and elegant prose. ![]() Smiley's stories lucidly explore the complexities of contemporary sexual and domestic life. Jane Smiley accomplishes a dazzling feat-without so much as a flashy phrase." - The Boston Globe, "With this volume, Jane Smiley ratifies her claim as one of her generation's most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love." -The New York Times "An extraordinary achievement. The emotional and moral complexity that she uncovers in the characters of these resonant novellas confirms Jane Smiley's singular talent." - The Washington Post Book World " Ordinary Love & Good Will are unforgettable novellas, built on lucid characterizations and elegant prose. "With this volume, Jane Smiley ratifies her claim as one of her generation's most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love." - The New York Times "An extraordinary achievement. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is ‘software’ that had to be invented, like tools such as the wheel. Consciousness, in Jaynes’s definition, is a box of conceptual tools that is not ‘included with the hardware’. The pivotal question is which concepts are available in a language. But language alone is not enough for consciousness, according to Jaynes. They were social creatures with a fully developed language. This is not to say that people with a bicameral mind were barbarians waving their bludgeons and uttering monosyllabic sounds. They were hallucinated voices that provided the answers when a person entered a stressful situation which couldn’t be solved by routine. ![]() These gods were no judging, moral or transcendent gods, but were more like each person’s problem solvers. The human part heard voices and experienced these as coming from gods. It is a mind with two chambers, the mind that is divided in a god part and a human part. ![]() Jaynes calls the mental space of these pre-conscious people the bicameral mind. In other words: they had no subjective consciousness. They did not have the ability: they had no introspection and no concept of ‘self’ that they could reflect upon. How did human beings who lived five thousand years ago view themselves? How did they make decisions and how did they reflect on their past? Julian Jaynes (1920 – 1997) proposes a radical answer to these questions: until a few thousand years ago human beings did not ‘view themselves’. ![]() ![]() ![]() Vivian knows this is the big break she’s been praying for. Now Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, who promises to catapult The Salvations into the national spotlight. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. “An utterly original and brilliant story.” –Reese WitherspoonĪ stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives-set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San FranciscoĪt home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. ![]() ![]() ![]() Kilpatrick, said that if he were limited to just one book on how to write, it would William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.Ĭredentials and testimonials aside, as someone who likes to write, I enjoyed reading ‘On Writing Well.’ The book helped me sharpen my writing toolset, identify areas of the craft I should learn more about & rejuvenated my passion for writing. In his book, The Writer’s Art, author James J. To date, it has served as the canonical writing book for three generations of writers, journalists, & editors. He also wrote 18 books in a writing career spanning more than half a century.įirst published in 1976, ‘ On Writing Well‘ is widely regarded as his best work. ![]() ![]() In the 1970s, he taught a writing class at Yale University. Before I briefly explain the note-taking process, I want to take a few sentences to introduce William Zinsser, the author of ‘On Writing Well.’Ī lifelong nonfiction writer, William began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune in 1946. ![]() ![]() ![]() The fantasy now stages a wider fight between bigotry and acceptance, between division and unity. ![]() In the 16 th century, Matthew battled past demons (literally, in the case of Kit Marlowe) and the secret of his vampire mother’s Ysabeau’s diseased bloodline was revealed.Īs season three approaches, the story has outgrown Diana and Matthew’s transgressive love. ![]() ![]() In season two, the pair time-walked back to Matthew’s old life in Elizabethan England where Diana completed her witch training and learned of her prophesied role in the future of magical creatures. In season one, Diana learned who she was and whom she loved – Matthew de Clermont, the son of a powerful vampire family with a historical prejudice against witches. It was the story of Diana, a scientist and witch whose extraordinary magic had been hidden from her by parents trying to protect her from the power-hungry Peter Knox, who sought to make it his own. Warning: contains spoilers for A Discovery of Witches seasons one and two.Ī Discovery of Witches began as a Romeo and Juliet-ish romance about the forbidden love between a witch and a vampire in a world where magical creatures were segregated by a centuries-old covenant. ![]() ![]() The chief usher became the man responsible for running the White House: making its occupants comfortable, caring for guests, arranging dinners, arranging for flowers, fixing the plumbing and the roof and the air conditioning, organizing and justifying the budget, arranging for the 2 million tourists who visit it each year, safeguarding the treasures that decorate it, supervising everything that has to do with making it a residence, a national monument and an office. His principal duties included making up the president's appointment calendar and ushering distinguished visitors into his presence.īy the time Mr. (Ike) Hoover, who served from 1891 to 1933. ![]() But there was more to it than that, just as there is more to the job of being chief usher at the White House than the term implies. "I do what I'm told to do," he would say. "What does the chief usher do?" he was sometimes asked. Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Kennedys, the Johnsons and the Nixons. ![]() He himself retired in 1969, having worked for the Franklin D. West began his career in the Executive Mansion on March 1, 1941, as an assistant to Howell G. ![]() ![]() He had undergone surgery for a lung ailment. Bernard West, 70, a discreet, self-effacing and efficient Iowan who had the extraordinary job of chief usher of the White House and served under six presidents, died of respiratory failure July 18 at Northern Virginia Doctors Hospital. ![]() ![]() You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. It is shou (respect) so deep it is in your bones. “This is how a daughter honors her mother. The Joy Luck Club, so widely loved and appreciated for being a description of the Chinese-American experience, can be summarized in one quote: So, I’ll try to add more details on the existing review but I can’t promise I will succeed. Yes, it’s a confusing thing to reconcile oneself with, but it’s still a powerful narrative. And The Joy Luck Club is a book that makes me do this. There’s more space here for me to spill my thoughts and I know that once I start, it usually takes me more energy than I can spare to stop. ![]() ![]() Maybe because writing a review on the blog needs me to open up more of myself than I would for the other media. But somehow, to put my thoughts about this book here, seemed too intimidating for me. I even uploaded this review to Instagram and Goodreads, too, I think. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan was the first book I read in 2023 and almost immediately, in a fit of emotion and productivity, wrote the review. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.All robots are programmed with the unbreakable “Three Laws of Robotics”: In the year 2064, she looks back at her decades of work with robots, and recounts notable occasions when robots were particularly odd or troublesome. The collection I, Robot unites nine short stories with the framing device of an interview with the world’s leading robopsychologist, Dr. Reading I, Robot in a week when the film M3GAN, a horror movie about a sentient robot doll, is in theaters, gives a real sense of the scope of conversations around artificial intelligences, and how these conversations have grown and evolved past much of Asmimov’s work. But he was also one of the first writers to extensively explore artificial intelligences and sentient robots in his work, so while he was breaking new ground, later authors could build on his foundations to dig deeper into conversations about personhood, autonomy, and how technology interacts with humanity. Isaac Asimov is a titan of science-fiction, and his work has had a lasting impact on the genre to this day. ![]() ![]() It can be a strange experience, reading formative classics. A collection of short stories: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As comedy, they tell the story of a prodigal son's journey from youth to maturity and an old rogue's art of surviving by means of jokes, tall tales and the art of being not only witty in himself but the cause that wit is in other men. Shakespeare excelled in every available genre of Elizabethan drama – and the Henry IV plays are his generic full house, hitting the jackpot identified by Polonius in Hamlet: "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral."Īs history, the plays paint a panorama of England, embracing a wider social range than any previous historical drama, as the action moves from court to tavern, council-chamber to battlefield, city to country, archbishop and lord chief justice to whore and thief. A n occupational hazard for the Shakespeare scholar is that one's lectures at literary festivals and in schools are nearly always followed by the well-intended but hoary old question "Which is your favourite Shakespeare play?" In reply, I cheat, offering two for the price of one: the first and second parts of Henry IV. ![]() |