Hiromi Goto's Half World Penguin Books, 2009 I hope you're not disappointed to see another instance of Spelling It Out here, so soon after that on Sarah Waters, but I have fallen under yet another BookSpell. I admit, I do tend to respond positively to an author's work when I
Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear Bantam Books, 1980 I had started high school when I read Jean Auel's first novel in the Earth's Children series, but I don't know if it was the 9th grade or the 13th. It was my grandmother's copy -- she bought a
I admit it: the first feeling that I had when I saw Laila Lalami's novel was relief, relief that it was obviously shorter than so many of the novels I wanted to read so quickly as part of the Orange Prize longlist reading I wanted to do. Not very propitious,
Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog Translated from the French by Alison Anderson (2006) Europa Editions, 2008 So I borrowed this as an uncatalogued paperback from the library. Sometime last autumn. ::deliberate vagueness:: I felt lucky because, as it was uncatalogued, it wasn't being tracked the same way as
Paule Marshall's Brown Girl Brownstones VMC No. 87 (1959) Without knowing anything of it, I chose Paule Marshall's novel Brown Girl, Brownstones to read with Black History Month in mind (along with Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine). It was kind of a random
