![]() For more information, read our disclosure. Also, these questions contain spoilers Inspired by Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a powerful and engaging tale of survival, anger, compassion, and the transformative powers of a good story. This is the world of Demon Copperhead, a novel that speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind. In a world where even superheroes abandon rural people in favor of cities, you reckon with your own invisibility. ![]() You face the perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. You grow up in a single-wide trailer in the southern Appalachia mountains with a mother who was just a teenager when you were born. ![]() ![]() Imagine being born into a world where your only assets are your dead father’s looks, your copper-colored hair, and a fierce talent for survival. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The book is rather slow at first and then it gets better the more you read. Will’s mum ends up in hospital after the stress of losing Will’s dad. Also he found out what his sister Rebecca really is. Will discovers why he doesn’t fit in with his family up top. The people who live underground are very pale and have fine white hair. In their journey to find Will’s dad they find an underground city with a colony of people living down there. Will and Chester see to it that they will set out to find Will’s dad. Will and his family are very worried about Dr Burrow’s disappearance. ![]() Will’s dad goes missing after having a big fight with Will’s mum. Also he likes to help Will dig his forty pits tunnel that has let him help with. His only friend is Will Burrow they hang out together at the very edge of the school grounds. His family are all different types of people and none of them seem to fit together like a normal family does.Ĭhester Rawls is a big, stocky bloke but ha has been picked on because of that for most of his school life. ![]() Will’s skin colour is a pale white and his hair is fine and is a snowy white colour. Who has only one friend called Chester Rawls. Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams is a novel about Will Burrow a shy small boy. The only thing he has in common with anyone in his family is his passion for digging which he shares with his dad Dr Burrow. At 14 years of age Will is living with his family in England and he feels like he doesn’t fit in with his family. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The two lived for many decades in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where the beaches, ponds, fields and forests became the landscape of Oliver’s major poetry. In the late 50s, in Austerlitz, she met Molly Malone Cook, a photographer they were life partners until Cook’s death in 2005. There she spent some years helping the late poet’s sister to organise her papers. ![]() As a young woman, she was devoted to the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay and went to visit her home in Austerlitz, New York, on an impulse of affection. Oliver briefly attended Ohio State University, in Columbus, and Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, but without taking a degree. ![]() It is clear that an unhappy childhood led her into the world of words, where she was glad to remain, a reader and writer with a superb affinity for the natural world, a poet with a strong transcendentalist streak – in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Though she gave few interviews, in one of them Oliver alluded to childhood abuse, although she did not elaborate. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of Edward Oliver, a schoolteacher, and Helen (nee Vlasak), a secretary. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As Thompson portrays this world, politics and power relationships seep into the deepest recesses of the mind, whether human or alien. It’s an incredible experience both for its driving action and its probing – through both character and action – of many ideas about colonialism, memory, identity and rebellion. There’s no middle volume problem in this trilogy. The theme of colonization sounds loudly from the outset, and Thompson rings many changes on the idea through this more action-oriented story. In Rosewater Insurrection Thompson vastly expands the narrative from primarily a single character’s viewpoint to embrace a half dozen other figures, including several of the alien beings behind Wormwood. Much of Rosewater is told through the viewpoint of Kaaro, a human “sensitive” who can interpret what is going on in the xenosphere. It’s the grand project of survival for a species that has destroyed its home planet: Colonizing the minds of Earth’s inhabitants. The real purpose of Wormwood is to spread microscopic alien cells (the xenosphere) around the world, gradually infiltrating humans to turn them into hosts for alien minds. The entity, known as a footholder, extends a dome around itself and offers both healing influence and electricity, encouraging humans to build the city of Rosewater around it. As we learned in Rosewater, the alien entity known as Wormwood crashed to earth in London in 2012, then worked through the Earth’s crust before surfacing in Nigeria in the 2050s. ![]() ![]() Perhaps, I sometimes rationalize, the ecstasy of sexual love is not so different from the near religious fervor of creating, or rather assembling language into poetry.” Cole’s poems explore the intersection of the domestic and the ecstatic, with language that both chafes against and sings toward its source in the body. In an essay on the influence of Hart Crane’s poetry on his own early development as a poet, Cole speculates on the possibility that “the pain of unsanctioned love was enabling to him as a poet, that an absence in life helped him to find a presence in art. He earned a BA at the College of William and Mary, an MA at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and an MFA at Columbia University. ![]() Born in Fukuoka, Japan, and raised in Virginia, poet Henri Cole grew up in a household where French, Armenian, and English were spoken. ![]() ![]() The guard cleared his throat as he shifted his weight from side to side. ![]() Her memories were more oppressive than any cell walls. Even if by some miracle she was pardoned at her retrial, there'd be no real reprieve. She'd been Confined for treason, but the truth was far worse than anyone could've imagined. It wasn't death she craved, but if that was the only way to silence the voices, then she was prepared to die. They screamed from the deepest recesses of her mind. They filled the silence between her heartbeats. ![]() They called to her from the corners of her dark cell. She'd been transferred to a single after attacking a guard, but for Clarke, there was no such thing as solitary. But as she rose up onto her elbow, peeling her shirt from the sweat-soaked cot, all she felt was relief. ![]() Her eyes locked on the guard's boots, and she braced for the rush of fear, the flood of desperate panic. The door slid open, and Clarke knew it was time to die. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He seemed to be the guy she was fighting, but he was kind, thoughtful, strong, and good looking. The girl went through crazy things, and there was a ‘bad boy’ involved. At first it was The Little Mermaid then off to The 12 Dancing Princesses. Sadie gets sent on a fairy tale fiction world adventure. I read most of this book in February and March and loved it! This story takes you on a wild adventure. Wishes are permanent, and if Sadie wants to get back to her home, she’ll have to strike a magical bargain–one that involves stealing a goblet from a powerful fairy queen. She misinterprets Sadie’s wishes and sends her back in time to be a part of The Little Mermaid story and then makes her one of the twelve dancing princesses. ![]() Enter Chrysanthemum Everstar: a gum-chewing, cell phone-carrying, high heel wearing fairy godmother in training. Her performance is so bad, it earns her a fairy godmother through the Magical Alliance’s Pitiful Damsel Outreach Program. Sadie Ramirez throws up during her tryouts on TV show America’s Top Talent. ![]() ![]() That’s an interesting conflict, given the fact that Russell and a friend of his have a conversation about how greatly sex has been deprioritized, at this stage in their lives. In this case, he fails to actually follow through, but there’s certainly a lot of sex in the book. ![]() Although, some people don’t think of it as a very sexy business. JM: God, I hope so! (laughs) I think fortunately there’s still sex everywhere, even in publishing. 13.īright, Precious Days opens with a scene of Russell, middle-aged and a publishing has-been, trying to be seduced by a much younger woman. McInerney will speak at the John Adams Institute on Sept. He has just released his eighth novel, ‘Bright, Precious Days’ (Knopf), the third book following the life and marriage of Russell and Corrine Calloway. ![]() Since his first novel ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ dropped onto the literary scene in 1984, Jay McInerney (b.1955) has been one of the strongest voices heralding the zeitgeist of New York City. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is a gripping and at times difficult-to-read memoir of a girl growing up in a survivalist Mormon family. He shows in detail how capitalism and profit drove the slave trade, the systematic torture that produced ever increasing cotton yields and how US and European banks created financial instruments with slaves as the underlying collateral.Įducated by Tara Westover deservedly made a lot of ‘Best of 2018’ book lists. ![]() Baptist was an eye-opening account of slavery in the period between Independence and the Civil War. On the other hand the longest book I ‘read’ - Cryptonomicon - was a whopping 1,139 pages / 42 hrs and 44 minutes listening time! The vast majority were audiobooks, but I have started reading physical books again rather than just e-books.įavorite non-fiction books that I read in 2019: The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward R. For full disclosure, the total of 36 does include 5 ‘Audible Originals’ that are shorter than a typical book - and in some cases, a bit of a stretch to be called a book. I managed to read 36 books in 2019 - slightly off my target of 40, but not bad considering extenuating circumstances. ![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe they enter a luxurious retirement village or their children stuff them into a grim, state-run institution called, paradoxically, Close of Day Cottages.įriday, host Kerri Miller talked with Shriver about her intensely personal book. ![]() ![]() One spouse goes through with it, while the other doesn’t. But when they actually cross that threshold, the novel spins out a dozen alternative scenarios. That’s the premise of Lionel Shriver’s new novel “Should We Stay or Should We Go.” The Wilkinsons are in their early ‘50s when they firmly decide 80 is their drop-dead date. Once they both turn 80, they will take their own lives together - the better to spare themselves and their loved ones a humiliating and protracted decline.īut what really happens when they turn 80? After Kay Wilkinson watches her father devolve from a kind and intelligent man into a paranoid stranger due to Alzheimer’s disease, she and her husband make a pact. ![]() |