sandrinepal's reviews
1227 reviews

Ça se lit vite et bien, comme du bon Meurice. Par contre, ça fait tout drôle de lire ces réflexions après avoir déjà fini "Dans l'oreille du cyclone". Guigui était tellement reconnaissant à France Inter de la liberté éditoriale qui était laissée à l'équipe... Ses commentaires sur les lignes qu'il se refuse à franchir avaient aussi une tout autre saveur avec le recul des évènements de cette année. Comme quoi, on n'est pas à l'abri de Roger au pouvoir.

This was clearly a case of great expectations: I was so absolutely enamored with "Leave the World Behind" that I figured I was going to be completely bowled over by this. Welp. Not so much. I mean, it's a great story, it's well written, but it lacks the urgency, the darkness, and honestly the bite of LTWB. Nothing really gets upended in the course of the narrative; in fact, I read the climax as almost... moralizing? I don't know, maybe I missed something, but this was not the homerun I anticipated.

A+ for subject matter, C for execution, and F- for style. This is a VERY (emphasis not just mine) detailed account of the months that followed the assassination of Caesar. The usual suspects feature prominently (Brutus, Cicero, the new triumviri) but so do bit players in the plot and the subsequent civil war. It's especially enlightening to see family rivalries and old grudges come to the fore in service of Octavian's new thirst for revenge/legitimacy. Because ultimately, it's hard to countenance that the future Augustus did all this to honor the manes of his dearly departed "dad". He was a shrewd kid, with a need to assert his authority, and getting rid of (almost) everyone who was anyone on the political scene is one heck of a way to achieve that. The shifting pov didn't do much to illuminate the relationships between factions, let alone when allegiances turned on a dime, but mostly there were some turns of phrase that were very opaque and I found myself doing more than one double-take to make sense of some sentences.

Love me some Bill Bryson, but this one a) hasn't aged great or b) hit too close to my own area of expertise. In a way, it was fun to hear old standards like Labov mentioned in passing (hashtag grad school), but the information was a little too loosey-goosey. Same goes for some of the points made about pronunciation. It's crazy how one or two imprecisions can ruin... what's 'suspension of disbelief' for nonfiction? Anyway, not over Bryson, as I immediately embarked on "At Home" after returning this one to the library.

I'm going to call this one 3.5 stars, because I'm indecisive by nature. On the one hand, as all Bryson's books I have read, it is replete with delightful tidbits. The breadth is pretty astounding when you take a step back: mousetraps, cemetery ground levels rising, making bootblack, syphilis, grave robbers, telephones and gas lighting, Palladio and the White House, and the list goes on. William Morris poisoned people with his color choices, y'all! The average 19th c. bedding weighed 80 pounds! On the other hand, it gets a little challenging to hold all these alluring loose ends together after meandering through a dozen rooms of the house. I think the logic may have been more obvious to Bryson himself, since he organized the book around his own (no doubt gorgeous) English home. For me, it read like a laundry list of fascinating trivia that might have been better as a series of feature articles than a book.

Toujours un "oui" franc et massif pour moi, cette série. Tout le monde en prend pour son grade : c'est parfait.

With a sophomoric tone that makes this the first book recommendation my 15-year-old has actually taken me up on, this is also a very in-depth look at how the fortunes of the obscenely rich are built, written in the purest muckraking tradition. My only beef with this book is its dire need of additional proofreading. The spelling errors in particular were eye-watering : you'll find it's for its, their for they're, and then for than aplenty.

I became a major fan of Rakoff in the early 2000s after first discovering him, along with Sedaris, on NPR's This American Life. I remember buying Fraud in hardcover as soon as it came out, despite my meager entry-level employee salary at the time. His voice in this collection was certainly a trip down memory lane, but not all the essays work equally well. I absolutely loved "The Bleak Shall Inherit" : it has aged really well and makes as much sense today as almost 15 years ago. I feel almost glad for Rakoff's sake that he didn't live to experience 2016: I have fond memories of thinking George W. Bush was mind-bogglingly inept. Those were the days. The limits have definitely been pushed since.
Tearing down Rent in "Isn't It Romantic?" seems like it would have been cathartic, but as I have no dog in that fight, it was only a mild chuckle for me. I was much more taken with "The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot" and its peek into the publishing world.
With all that said, the darker, introspective pieces about his cancer didn't capture the same deprecative tone that he so adeptly directs at himself and others in "Shrimp" or "Great Expectations". Maybe I found that level of humanity too scarily plain, coming from him, I'm not sure. 

This book is a reflection on people's fascination with Bigfoot, and marginally the author's fascination with the people in question. It takes great care not to be judgmental, though the portrait that emerges between the lines is still evocative of rural white America. I read this in part hoping to find fodder for a short unit I teach freshman science majors about cryptozoology and I largely came up empty-handed. Where Bill Bryson serves his reflections on nature with a healthy side of hard facts, this book relies mostly on the musings of the author. Everyone's entitled to their Walden, I guess, it just isn't what I was looking for. 

Hmm, I wanted to love this a lot more than I actually did. On paper, a mashup of Austen and cozy mystery was screaming my name. In reality, it was heavy on the dreaded YA-ish romance. Shipping a relationship between Lizzie Bennett's son and Henry Tilney's daughter is all fine and well, but I object to placing young Darcy on the spectrum with a less-than-subtle implication that his father is also in need of a diagnosis. I find that interpretation offensive, both to the character of Darcy AND to people who are on the spectrum.

End rant. The mystery was sort of meh, but I must admit it was fun to imagine the future of the characters one loved in Austen novels. I could really do without the kids' generation is all. Based on the titles of the subsequent volumes in the series, it sounds like Claudia Gray is very much about villains getting their comeuppance and I'm not mad about that.