Coffeespoons

Summary "Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while an old friend resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny." - from NPR.org The good stuff It started with the books. And it went on and on with books. The Marriage Plot is replete with references to books. We catch the three main characters, Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell, in college and the first year out of it, and much mention is made of their reading material. In fact, two of the characters fall in love precisely because of books, and the other one in the triangle uses his readings and scholarship as a crutch for his unrequited love. However, it is Madeleine's reading list that speaks the most to me, since she loves the narrative and considers herself a "Victorianist," a specialization I would also love to have. (Just to show how much I enjoyed the books, see the list compiled below.) I on...

It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2011 Pulitzer for fiction . And, Aldrin was raving about it .:) Which makes it a book that I could not pass up. In fact, I went all the way to Fully Booked , twice, just to get my reserved trade paperback copy of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad . I held off on the Kindle version because of some negative feedback about the powerpoint chapter (i.e., it was hard to read). Yes, there's a powerpoint chapter, which I found utterly brilliant and charming. Forgive me if I can't summarize A Visit from the Goon Squad . I will have to seek recourse through this Publishers Weekly review . We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's...

Read: 2/18/09 4/5 stars Still working on my Pulitzer Project. But I read this not just because it's a Pulitzer winner. I gave it to a friend last Christmas, who said she loved it and read it in two days. She also asked if I chose it because the blurb reminded me of her. I have to say I did. Breathing Lessons is about a middle aged husband and wife, Ira and Maggie Moran, who go on a road trip to visit a friend's husband's funeral. There is nothing particularly remarkable about Ira and Maggie. They are live in a small town, run a small business, have one grown-up son and a daughter about to go away to college. They do, however, have one estranged daughter-in-law and granddaughter, owing to their son's divorce. On their way to the funeral and back, Maggie keeps trying to convince her husband to visit their granddaughter, whom they have not seen in years. The desire is brought about since Maggie supposedly hears their former daughter-in-law over the radio claiming that she...

Legend: Books I've read - bold Books with a review - linked 2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 2007 - The Road (McCarthy) 2006 - March (Brooks) 2005 - Gilead (Robinson) 2004 - The Known World (Jones) 2003 - Middlesex (Eugenides) 2002 - Empire Falls (Russo) 2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon) 2000 - Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri) 1999 - The Hours (Cunningham) 1998 - American Pastoral (Roth) 1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Millhauser) 1996 - Independence Day (Ford) 1995 - The Stone Diaries (Shields) 1994 - The Shipping News (Proulx) 1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Butler) 1992 - A Thousand Acres (Smiley) 1991 - Rabbit at Rest (Updike) 1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Hijuelos) 1989 - Breathing Lessons (Tyler) 1988 - Beloved (Morrison) 1987 - A Summons to Memphis (Taylor) 1986 - Lonesome Dove (McMurtry) 1985 - Foreign Affairs (Lurie) 1984 - Ironweed (Kennedy) 1983 - The Color Purple (Wal...

My first book for the year. I started it towards the end of 2008, actually, but it wasn't the sort of book you could read in a day. Well, maybe for other people, but not for me. March is the title character, whom others will more likely know through Little Women. Of course, this time, it's not Meg, Jo, Beth, nor Amy. And not even Marmee. It's the under-exposed patriarch of these virtuous females, Mr. March, who does not appear much in the book, on account of being in the Civil War. Brooks's novel, the 2005 Pulitzer prize winner for fiction, traces the adventures of Mr. March through the Civil War, with numerous flashbacks of his youth, his courtship of Marmee, and his involvement in their nation's history. Make no mistake, this is not written in the same vein as Little Women. Yes, the language and style may be the same, but these characters are revealed to be not so virtuous after all. It is not a tell-all, however, and the four little women hardly enter the picture...