skinny legs and all

October 15, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Great Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about book titles. Specifically, good ones! I’m only human, and as susceptible to the pull of a great title as anyone. So here are ten that got my attention!

A Clockwork Orange: I remember reading one that Burgess wanted to contrast the idea of mechanics/clockwork with the most alive thing he could think of, and came up with the juicy burst of an orange. I loved the book, and the title is captivating in its own right.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: I understand why this wouldn’t have worked as the title of a movie, but it’s so much better than Blade Runner.

The Color Purple: Every time I think about the title, I remember the central tenet of the book…which is effective for a title to do!

Exit West: This one just immediately suggests questions you have to read the book to find the answers to, like who’s doing the exiting, and west of where?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: This title is a spoiler for its own book! But it promises an interesting story, and it delivers.

Skinny Legs and All: Tom Robbins has a way with eye-catching titles.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I read this book because a college roommate liked it, but I would have 100% picked it up based on the title alone anyways.

Thank You For Smoking: There words in this order is so unexpected to see that it immediately grabs your attention.

Pride and Prejudice: The alliteration on this one just gets it stuck in your head. And it has a nice rhythm to it when you say it out loud!

Gone Girl: More alliterative goodness. The single syllables here give it a distinctive ring as well.

January 23, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Liked But Can’t Really Remember

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we really liked at the time that have kind of faded in the memory banks. As someone who reads quite a bit, I find this happens fairly often…I have a good opinion of the book when I’ve finished it, and then within a couple months, I’ll remember only a vague outline. Here are some books that I’d need a refresher on if I ever had to describe despite liking them when I read them.

A Brave New World: I read this in high school and thought it was incredible and I could not do more than describe the gist of it if I had to. It’s going on my “to revisit on audio” list.

Under the Banner of Heaven: I hated Krakauer’s Into The Wild, but loved this when I grabbed it at the airport on the way back to Alabama for my second year of law school. I remember how compelling it was, but remember few of the actual details besides the most egregious ones.

The Kite Runner: My clearest memory of this book, which I know I thought was really interesting because I’d not read fiction from that area of the world much yet (I was in college), is that an ex-boyfriend lent it to me and I prepared what I’m sure was a truly embarrassing letter about how I wanted to get back together to tuck inside when I returned it. Luckily he told me he didn’t need it back when I tried to give it to him.

Memoirs of a Geisha: This is sort of cheating, because I listened to it on audio a few months back so I DO remember it now, but holy smokes I’d forgotten SO MUCH of the plot. And I’d read this multiple times, too!

Never Let Me Go: I think the themes resonated so strongly in this book that the plot kind of just fell away because it’s not really about the plot, is it?

Skinny Legs and All: Like many of Tom Robbins’ books, this book has multiple plot threads, so I’m not going to give myself too hard of a time about the fact that I remember little about it except how much I’ve liked reading it the several times I’ve done so.

The Lovely Bones: I read this in high school and think I re-read it once (maybe twice?) in college and other than the central conceit I could tell you almost nothing about it except that I liked it so much that it still lives on my shelf.

The Interestings: I read this only a few years ago and while this is probably the one I remember the best on this list, how little I do actually remember is extra annoying because I loved reading it so much!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I think my memories of this book get conflated with the movie (Blade Runner), even though I’m very clear on remembering that when I saw the movie (in college) after reading the book (in high school), the book was better.

Child 44: Another one I read fairly recently and is all fuzzy anyways! In my defense, this is a thriller and the plot is all twisty-turny so the odds were stacked against me.

October 3, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is book boyfriends/girlfriends…you know, when you’re reading a book and get all swoony about one of the characters. This is a bit of a tough one, for me, because I don’t read a ton of books with a central romance (which tend to be the type of books that make you all swoony over characters), so I’m splitting it up: five boy crushes, and five girl crushes!

The Dudes:

Captain Wentworth (Persuasion): This was the first Austen I read, and the hero remains my favorite. He’s loyal and good-natured and big enough to forgive a foolish spurning means that even though she’s an “old maid” (at 27!), the love he and Anne have for each other is just delayed rather than denied and this book is great and so is he.

Kolya (City of Thieves): Rakish and high-spirited, Kolya tends to win over everyone he meets with his charm. Especially women, and it’s not hard to understand why: young and handsome and endearing tends to be an easy sell.

Charles O’Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): This series is so amazing because it has such great characters: prickly Meg, self-possessed Charles Wallace, and brave, kind Charles, who is able to maintain his own stable goodness despite adverse circumstances. It’s easy to understand why Meg loves him and it’s hard not to love him a bit yourself.

Eric Northman (Dead To The World): This whole series has a rotating cast of love interests for Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone whose favorite isn’t Eric, particularly in the fourth book, where he’s lost his memory and imperiousness and he’s just a tall, handsome sweetheart.

Jean Valjean (Les Miserables): A man who recovers from some previous missteps to live virtuously and devote himself to the loving raising of a child who isn’t his? If that’s not dreamy to you, we have different ideas of what dreamy is.

The Ladies:

Sabriel (Sabriel): Smart and brave and with powerful magic, Sabriel is enchanting and one of those characters who you can never forget once you’ve experienced.

Yvaine (Stardust): An actual star, kidnapped by a young man named Tristan to be a present for the girl he pines for, Yvaine is sarcastic and witty and it is no surprise that Tristan eventually realizes that he’s actually in love with her after all, because she’s great.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): If you can read this book and not fall a little bit in love with Natasha, you’ve got a heart of stone. Her spirit is what holds this enormous epic together, and the way she ends up still doesn’t sit quite right with me.

Ellen Cherry Charles (Skinny Legs and All): Tom Robbins is a love-him-or-hate-him writer, and I tend to be in the former group. Ellen is a waitress who wants to be an artist, and her struggle to figure out her relationship with her husband and the world and herself and her pride and vulnerability make her a winning heroine.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones’s Diary): Bridget drinks too much, can’t stick to a diet and exercise plan, and speaks before she thinks. She is a delight and I want to be best friends.

March 22, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough. Since I’ve posted fairly little about my reading outside this blog and obviously I read a lot before I started, I’m going to take this opportunity to write about ten of my all-time favorites as mini-reviews!

Lolita: An incredible book that I really believe everyone should read. Humbert Humbert is objectively an evil man, a child molester that marries a mother just to get close to her pre-teen daughter, and once the mother dies, takes advantage of Lolita’s powerlessness to finally satisfy his desire for her. But it’s an astonishingly beautifully written example of how everyone is the hero of their own story, even terrible people.

The Secret History: This was a book I read originally in AP English in high school and have read so often I had to replace my copy when the cover fell off. When a working-class California kid goes to school at an elite Northeastern liberal arts college, his background in Latin gains him entrance into a tight-knit group of Classics scholars. The book opens with the group murdering one of their own, and then goes back in time to show you the before, and then the after as the group struggles to cope with what they’ve done. So good.

The Virgin Suicides: This is my all-time favorite book, and my signed copy (from a reading Eugenides did at Michigan while he was there) is one of my most prized possessions. I connected with it instantly: when the youngest Lisbon sister is taken to the hospital after her first suicide attempt right at the beginning of the book, she goes to Bon Secours Hospital, which happens to be where I was born. It’s a wonderful coming of age story about infatuation and obsession and bad parenting and those the marks those heady teenage years when you feel so much so deeply leave on your psyche.

1984: This is the first book I can remember loving. I must have read it in 7th or 8th grade. From the opening line (“It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen”), I was just totally hooked on the story of Winston, Julia, and the dystopian world they live in. In today’s increasingly surveiled society, this novel is more relevant and important than ever.

Emma: I wasn’t a girl that grew up on Austen. It was only a few years ago that I read my first (Persuasion) and have from there read my way through most of the rest. And maybe it’s colored by my affection for her modern-day incarnation Cher Horowitz, but Emma Woodhouse is one of my favorite characters in literature…I think as much as anything because she’s a fundamentally happy character, not given some sort of trial to suffer through but whose conflict is mainly coming to terms with the consequences of her own non-malicious but oblivious mistakes.

The Cider House Rules: I saw the movie first, in high school, and loved it. Once I found out it was based on a book, that was my introduction to John Irving. It’s still my favorite Irving, probably because it illustrates (beautifully) one of my most deeply held principles: that this world doesn’t exist in black and white and sometimes virtue means re-evaluating your ideals to accommodate real life in all its infinite complexity.

The Great Gatsby: I read this for my junior year English class and hated it. HATED. I thought Gatsby was a moron and Daisy was a twit and thought the ending that left no one happy was just fine for a group of awful people. But then I grew up and experienced loss and heartbreak and regret, and did a complete 180 on the book. It’s so great but I think it’s read way too early in the standard high school curriculum. I feel like you need to have at least one big romantic loss in your rearview mirror to really appreciate this one the way it deserves.

Skinny Legs and All: This was a book I actually grabbed at my dad’s house growing up, and the trademark Tom Robbins mix of sex, metaphysics, religion with a quick-moving plot and bold female characters just grabbed me and didn’t let go. The adventures of Ellen Cherry Charles and Boomer the accidental artist and Can o’ Beans and Dirty Sock and Spoon has always had a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf.

Remains of the Day: I read this a few years ago and it just ripped my still-beating heart out and stomped on it. As English butler Stevens reminisces about his past piece by piece over the course of the book, you see how his sense of duty and propriety has robbed him of the chance to experience any real happiness in his life. Gorgeous and sad and wonderful.

The Stranger Beside Me: I’ve always been fond of true crime…my mom had some Ann Rule books laying about here and there when I was growing up and I enjoyed them, but this one is the one to read. You see, when she was just getting started in her writing career, Rule spent time volunteering at a suicide crisis call center. And one of her frequent partners, with whom she grew fairly close? Ted Bundy. Yes, that Ted Bundy. She tells the story of his criminal history while at the same time telling the story of her coming to terms with the reality of the bright young man she had thought of as a friend. Fascinating stuff.

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