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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