Four quick reviews

Posted by Kate W in Fiction and tagged with 2019, art, audiobook, book review, Caitriona Lally, Dianne Touchell, fiction, Jessie Burton, Rachel Kushner, reading challenge, review, young adult November 13, 2019

I’m hopelessly behind with reviews and I’m fairly sure I won’t have much free time between now and the end of the year… so, catching up with what I liked (or didn’t) about four recent reads. Continue reading →

Bookish (and not so bookish) Thoughts

Posted by Kate W in Shelves and Libraries, Stuff and Nonsense and tagged with Andrew Sean Greer, author talk, book bingo, Bookish (and not so bookish) Thoughts, Cheryl Strayed, Favel Parrett, Heather Rose, Jenny Erpenbeck, library, Meg Wolitzer, Nepal, podcast, Rachel Kushner, television, twitter March 26, 2019

01. Yay! Favel Parrett has a new book coming in September – There Was Still Love.

02. And there was a hint from Heather Rose about her new book… Continue reading →

Sample Saturday – do they live up to the hype?

Posted by Kate W in Stuff and Nonsense and tagged with music, Rachel Kushner, Sample Saturday, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Trent Dalton March 23, 2019

Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, all three books have been hyped (and reviewed favourably by some of my favourite bloggers) but do I want to read them? Continue reading →

The Top 50 from the Best Books of 2018 List of Lists

Posted by Kate W in Stuff and Nonsense and tagged with 2018, A. J. Finn, Akwaeke Emezi, Andrew Roberts, book list, Chloe Benjamin, Curtis Sittenfeld, David Sedaris, Denis Johnson, Esi Edugyan, Gary Shteyngart, Idra Novey, Kristin Hannah, Lauren Groff, Leïla Slimani, Leslie Jamison, Ling Ma, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Lisa Halliday, Luis Alberto Urrea, Madeline Miller, Meg Wolitzer, Melissa Broder, Michael Ondaatje, Michelle Obama, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Olga Tokarczuk, Olivia Laing, Ottessa Moshfegh, Pat Barker, Patrick deWitt, R. O. Kwon, Rachel Cusk, Rachel Kushner, Rebecca Makkai, Richard Powers, Rumaan Alam, Sally Rooney, Sarah Perry, Sayaka Murata, Sheila Heti, Shobha Rao, Sigrid Nunez, Susan Orlean, Tara Westover, Tayari Jones, Tommy Orange, William Trevor, Zadie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston December 9, 2018

This is my annual community service to book-bloggers – a list of the books that appear most frequently on all of the lists (37 of them) I listed on Best Books of 2018 – A List of Lists.

Here it is, the 2018 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2018-Book-Lists-Before-December-31 top 50 books. Continue reading →