My kindle offered me a free book the other day called Family Money by Chad Zunker. I read it over the weekend. Would not read again! The protagonist kept getting into a jam, then picking the absolute worst response.
I DNFed Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell for an essays worth of reasons. The short answer is mainly the overly flowery writing style, her pose is so purple my Kindle dripped lilac. Also her over use of metaphors, her failure to make her characters three dimensional, her tendency to pad the run time with descriptions of things we didn’t need describing, the rather blatant misanthropy of not wanting to call Shakespeare by his name: he was the father, the latin tudor, his son etc.
I didn’t get far enough, but I suspect she was going to really lean into the “No Homo” and entirely ignore the overwhelming evidence that Shakespeare was likely bisexual.
New thread: Bye February! Hello March!
Was he now? That explains Coriolanus.
My husband gave me this book as a gift.
My wife bought it for herself and I borrowed it. (Actually, she may have left it on my bedside “to read” pile. We do that to each other – leaving books we think the other ought to read or would like)
And Cymbeline. No wholly straight man wrote the Fidele death scene…
Finished A Time for Mercy, by John Grisham, his third novel featuring Clanton, Mississippi attorney Jake Brigance. Set in 1990, Brigance is tasked by a judge with defending a 16-year-old boy charged with the capital murder of a deputy sheriff. The boy, his sister and their mother are all trailer trash who were living with the murder victim, a violent alcoholic who terrorized all of them brutally. The boy, underdeveloped due to his hard life – he looks to all appearances like he’s 12 – mistakenly thinks the deputy finally killed his mother one night when she’s unconscious on the kitchen floor, figures he and his sister are next and takes the deputy’s own service revolver and shoots him point blank in the head while he’s passed out cold but showing signs of reviving. This being Mississippi, the general sentiment is stick him in the gas chamber right away. This is actually quite a good story … right up to the very end, when it all falls flat. I’m scratching my head thinking, “That’s the end?” It almost feels like he must be planning to continue it in another novel. Recommended only for Grisham fans.
Next up is The Beautiful and Damned, by F Scott Fitzgerald, his second novel, published exactly 100 years ago.