Review: The Last September

The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

I committed a bibliophilic sin, ladies and gentlemen—I watched the movie before I read the book. To be fair, I had no idea the book existed when I watched the film last summer, which was on a list of recommended films for my Ireland trip. (I’m getting dangerously close to the two weeks and a half of posts I need to schedule while I’m away. Challenge accepted.) I really need to research these things a little more thoroughly. But in any case, I watched Deborah Warner’s amazing film before the Elizabeth Bowen novel it was based upon, which colored my reading. Hence the reason it’s a bibliophilic sin, I suppose. (The review of the film will be going up sometime in March. I apparently now only watch movies based on books…)

Review: Lost in the Meritocracy

Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn

I’ll be honest—I expected something a little different from Lost in the Meritocracy. I was just expecting a scathing indictment of the soullessness of the American education system buoyed by Kirn’s personal experiences here and there, and I got a memoir instead. Gentle readers, you may recall that I don’t really read memoirs; unless someone I already really like has written it (like Michael Chabon or Tina Fey), I tend to sail by them completely. In fact, I don’t even remember how this recommendation even came to me… In the end, though, I still got what I came for, even if it wasn’t as much as I wanted or in quite the same way as I expected.

Review: The Nine

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This is the penultimate book I have to read for my political science course. I enjoyed it so much that I may talk to the professor about adding it instead of simply recommending it to the other political science course of his I take. It would be much more beneficial than the reading currently used for that class, but I digress.

Review: Atonement

Atonement
by Ian McEwan

I picked up the recommendation for Atonement from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust, and I also wanted to read it because the film adaptation was quite successful. It took a few days for me to get over the utter disappointment of The Historian and start on this novel. It soon turned out I couldn’t read it before bed, because I would keep reading it until midnight. I fully intended to go to sleep at 10 o’clock last night, but Atonement thought otherwise. I was quite delighted with this turn of events–it cleaned out the bad taste of The Historian beautifully.

Review: The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood

This is the last book I checked out from my high school library. It’s sad, in a way. (I really need to get started on gifts for the librarians.) I’m so relieved it was such a wonderful book–I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to end it on The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. It also hadn’t been rented since 2004–the first time it had been checked on. Shame on you, student body!

Margaret Atwood is on my big list of books to read, but this isn’t. (On the list: rereading The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.) But, in a pinch, I’ll cast around for an author’s other works. I do not leave libraries empty-handed.