Reviews and Comments

I thought this was a short story collection. Someone I read online had recommended an earlier short story, but this was what my library had. The book interweaves two very different story lines, so it wasn't until chapter three that I realized.
One line consists of letters from a post Civil War woman running a boarding house in Tenessee to her deceased sister, while dealing with a boarder who may John Wilkes Booth. The other is the first person narrative of a Finn, a teacher losing his brother to cancer, and his ex-girlfriend to suicide. There are echoes within each story line of the other, but to say this doesn't neatly wrap things up is an understatement. Which is fine by me, although perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind for the mix of grief and insanity.

An out-of-order diary that makes a point of emphasizing that it's been edited and sorted after the fact. I find it twee in places, and of course it's hard for me to identify with a successful academic in the years before Trump 1.

This is a very light biography of John Donne. Selections from his poetry are sparse as well, though the book is making the case its being relevant to modern readers. The approach made it much more accessible at the risk of reducing the overall impact. It still was interesting, though I would have liked more historical background than was given.

It took me close to a year to finish this one -- I grabbed the Kindle version shortly after getting my Paperwhite. Wolf Hall was one of my first Kindle ebooks back in the day. Like Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, I thoroughly enjoyed the imagery, the details of England in the reign of Henry VIII; however, it's a long book (over 700 pages) and the cast of characters as usual was hard to track at times, and slowed me down. I also was of course dreading Cromwell's inevitable downfall and execution, which was rapid, although foreshadowed in numerous ways in the previous years before.