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Category Archives: Reviews by Bethany
Two Years of Reading, in Snapshots
So Jill and I are in the Vacaville Panera again, contemplating blogging. For a while, reviewing every book I read felt perfectly natural, but that has changed. But she had a great idea: let’s go back through all the books … Continue reading
Posted in Reviews by Bethany, Snapshots, Uncategorized
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A Review of Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
As food memoirs go, this is a good one. The premise is that New Yorker staff writer Bill Buford “accidentally” invited celebrity chef Mario Batali to a dinner party at his home in 2002 (Batali was a friend of a … Continue reading
A Review of Avi’s The Button War
Summer is here and I’m reading like a maniac. At least half of the books I’ve read this month are for kids, since I just finished my first year teaching elementary and middle school (after ten years at the high … Continue reading
A Review of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One
I didn’t time my review of this novel with the weekend of its film adaptation’s release on purpose. I started this book in December but put it down after a hundred pages for some reason, in spite of the fact … Continue reading
A Review of Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife
This review contains what the young people call “spoilers.” Read at your own risk. The second installment in this trilogy is my favorite, I think. In this book – which is also the shortest of the three – we learn … Continue reading
A Review of Lawrence Osborne’s The Forgiven
A month ago I could have written a fantastic review of this book – its tension, its creepiness, its unlikeable protagonist, the works. But for now, here are the basics. This is a novel about David Henniger and his wife … Continue reading
A Brief Review of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
This is one of those “quietly good” books I keep meaning to read more of. Though only 144 pages long, it tells a complex story from five distinct points of view: one chapter each from the third-person perspective of a … Continue reading
A Review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
When we were freshmen in college, Jill gave me a book of cartoons for Christmas called I Went to College… and it Was Okay. I looked for the book before I started writing this review, and I couldn’t find it. … Continue reading
A Review of Olivia Manning’s School for Love
This novel is about Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey … Continue reading
A Review of John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story
If nothing else, this memoir will make book lovers everywhere envious of John Kaag. Some six or seven years before he wrote this book, Kaag was in rural New Hampshire helping to organize a conference on William James. He was … Continue reading
Postcards From Purgatory 