Reading Notes

Had a fallow time for personal reading – too busy with mss and literary consultancy work. Today I returned to Miss Thing and decided to start over. This time, for some reason that I can’t fathom [my mood, the sunny weather?] I got right into it and was completely hooked, spell-bound, won over by the sheer audacity of the writing. [...]

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Reading Notes

On p. 28 of Miss Thing – not quite into it yet. Written as  series of notes and autobiographical sketches. The story so far – Andromeda’s feminist Professor mother has committed suicide and her Grandmother has moved into their apartment; across the courtyard in the opposite apartment is Sam, failed writer. They notice each other [...]

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Reading Notes

Finally back to reading – picking up where I left off with The Abominable Man (MB no.7) – although I’ll probably begin again, and beginning Nora Chassler’s Miss Thing (TRP).

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Reading Notes

Finished The Unnamed last night. This is my second read-through for a review, but, unlike Valeria’s Last Stand, Dirty Little Angel, or The Legend of Sander Grant (all US publications), The Unnamed doesn’t get better on the second read. Nothing new springs out of the pages. I was hoping for a deeper, multi-layered read.

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Reading Notes

Woke up thinking through the puzzle of the Ferris book. What’s wrong with it?Can’t quite put my finger on it but there’s something that annoys in this ‘trying too hard to be literary novel’. I want to follow the mysterious man to a conclusion; I want to know about the court case & whether Tim [...]

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Reading Notes

Mostly unbookishness today, although I did read up on all the gossip in the hairdresser’s ‘library’ – why don’t they have books? Anyway, up to p. 220 on the re-read and Ferris is beginning to get under my skin. A book that I didn’t really connect to on the first read has grown into a [...]

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Reading Notes

The Unnamed just got interesting – took off into a gripping story.  Some of the similes are clichèd and the sentence structure is annoying, but the story now takes precedence so that these no longer matter. Where did it happen? On p. p.80, when Tim Farnsworth finally loses control by taking it. Ferris undercuts a brilliant scene between [...]

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Reading Notes

So that was MBeck no. 6 – another satisfying read. Chapter 21 introduced a new feature to the series – introspection. MBeck considers all the options and where before this was all done ‘off the page’ with the reader simply following the action at the same time as the characters, here, like a Miss Marple [...]

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