It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Hanya Yanagihara
2023: What I Read
Here’s my year in books (tomorrow I’ll post my favourites for 2023) – Continue reading
Nonfiction November 2023 – Book Pairings
It’s Week 3 of Nonfiction November, this week hosted by Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home. The task? Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. This is my absolute favourite #NFN exercise.
Women and ageing – A Question of Age by Jacinta Parsons and The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. Got to Bonnard in the nick of time. Apparently India Mahdavi’s exhibition design was a little much for the traditionalists but I thought it was outstandingly beautiful. I loved the wallpapers. I loved how the each space drew you into the next. I loved all the colour. Continue reading
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
The word that comes to mind when I think To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is ‘ambitious’. And I felt somewhat ambitious when I opened the first of its 708 pages (it was during the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge – what was I thinking?!). Anyway, I am a little unfair on big books – I expect a lot for my reading-time-investment – To Paradise delivered in parts.
Yanagihara has essentially created three books in one – re-imagining the past and describing an eerily possible future. The stories are lightly interlinked through names, families, a house in Manhattan; physical and mental illness; and the colonisation of Hawaii. Continue reading
20 Books of Summer (except that it’s Winter)
Cathy at 746 Books is hosting the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge again this year. As Cathy explains, it’s the most relaxed reading challenge you’ll participate in (swap books out, change your target, do whatever). The challenge is straightforward – read twenty books between June 1st and September 1st. Continue reading
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
My husband observed the mammoth pile of discarded tissues next to Rob Delaney’s memoir, A Heart That Works, and asked, “Why do you do this to yourself?” The same question was asked when I watched Ricky Gervais’s After Life, read Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and actually, the list goes on and on. I cry to the point of a migraine. I don’t really know why I go back for more.
So, if you are planning on picking up Delaney’s memoir about the time during which his one-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and then died, know that it is devastating, humorous in parts, confronting and beautifully written with unflinching honesty. Continue reading
The Top 54 from the Best Books of 2022 List of Lists
Presenting the 2022 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2022-Book-Lists-Before-December-31 top 54 books.
(This is my annual community service to book-bloggers – a list of the books that appear most frequently on the 52 lists that I listed on Best Books of 2022 – A List of Lists – enjoy!). Continue reading
I’m waiting for… 2022 edition
Proving that I don’t actually care about my never-really-shrinking-TBR-list is this list of new releases that are on my radar for 2022. Continue reading
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
Can’t recall the last time I felt terrified while reading but Animal by Lisa Taddeo had me terrified for the first 200 pages and uneasy for the remainder.
The title sets the tone, and from the outset it is unclear whether the narrator, Joan, is the hunter, or the hunted. Continue reading