[257] Free Food for Millionaires – Min Jin Lee

“Experience was a funny thing: The downside of knowing things intimately was that she had also, in the process, degraded sex. She was still lost. What was sex for? She’d had good sex, bad sex, losses, and conquests. Stretches without. But more importantly, if she were to take off her clothes again and agree to [...]

Books with a Twist

This week’s question: Do you like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings? What book with a surprise ending is your favorite? Or your least favorite? I enjoy books with multiple layers of meanings, complicated plots, subsidiary branches that accentuate the main story, twists, and unexpected endings. All of these elements are not prerequisite to [...]

Random Thoughts

Everybody I ran into today asked me the same question (they are seriously and facetiously concerned how Apple’s new gadget will affect the life of this bookworm): Will you get an iPad? I’ll say it once, no, because I love the feeling of having a book in my hands. I thought about getting an e-reader [...]

Reading Notes: Free Food for Millionaires

After three very serious books: a classic, stream of consciousness, and rhetoric, a shift in gear is in need. How about chick lit? Now it was a Saturday night in June, a week after Casey’s college graduation. Her four years at Princeton had given her a refined white boyfriend, an agnostic’s closeted passion for reading [...]

[256] Death with Interruptions – Jose Saramago

Since that first deplorable incident, which, from the moment the world began, demonstrated the difficulties of family life, and right up until the present day, the process has remained unchanged for centuries and centuries and more centuries, repetitive, unceasing, uninterrupted unbroken, varying only in the many ways of passing from life to non-life, but basically [...]

Etiquette for Loaned Books

Where do you keep any books borrowed from friends or the library? Do they live with your own collection, or do you keep them separate? Do you monitor them in any way? Consider how obsessive-compulsive I am in preserving the condition of my books, I have to introduce tighter measure to ensure the condition of [...]

Book Rewards Program Pick

For my Books Reward Program redemption at Books Inc., I was aiming for Molly Fox’s Birthday, which was highly recommended by book bloggers in the UK. I was disappointed to find out that the book (trade paperback, published by Picador) will not be available until April. After searching the shelves and letting my whims run [...]

[255] To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

“For sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance away.” [182] “No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay.” [186] To the Lighthouse is set [...]

Under-appreciated Authors

This week’s question: Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. This is a tough call. After reading some [...]

Reading Notes: To the Lighthouse

The dreary and wet weather truly taps into the mood of reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The waves of storms that lash California, with rain pouring down to the roofs with such monstrous intensity, is curiously in sync with the rhythm that moves as waves of the sea move, as the novel takes place [...]