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Category Archives: What I’m Reading

The Opposite Of Everyone

Novel about hard-driving divorce attorney Paula Vauss, or Kali, as her Southern born, free-spirited mother Kai named her.  At 13, Kali turns her mother in to the police precipitating a lifelong estrangement.  Years later, Paula discovers the things she didn’t know about that time her life, including a brother and a sister.  I really liked […]

Codex by Lev Grossman

Gave this to Karl for Christmas but had to steal it when I ran out of things to read in Cancun.  Like St. John Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun, Codex is a earlier work for this author, Lev Grossman, who wrote the amazing Magicians series.  And you can see the stepping stones to the longing, brilliant […]

Get Out Of My Life…..

… But First Could You Drive Me And Cheryl To The Mall?  by Anthony E. Wolf, Ph.D.  Linda passed this on to me and I slogged through in on our Cancun vacation.  Wolf’s writing is haphazard, mostly full of made-up conversations between parents and teenagers that, while they may resonate with parents, aren’t followed up […]

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Thought I’d try this earlier novel by Mandel after devouring her hit, Station Eleven.  Anton Waker grows up in a family dealing in stolen goods and falls into an illegal passport operation with his cousin Aria.  He wants to get out and makes dramatic choices to do so.  Part novel, part thriller.  I could see […]

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

What a charming memorable book.  Ove is a grumpy old man outraged by everyone in his path.  His beloved wife, perhaps the only person who has ever seen beyond his crabby, demanding exterior, has died and he plans on joining her.  But the needs of others get in the way and Ove’s sense of duty […]

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Oh my word. I LOVED this book.  I really really struggled to extract myself as needed to tend to life.  Most of humanity is decimated by the Georgia Flu.  We follow The Symphony, a group of musicians and actors, traveling the eastern coast of Lake Michigan through towns left vacant 20 years before.  But Mandel […]