Rabbitin

Summary from Goodreads : Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you, you lose a family member, you can't pay the bills. But it can be pretty great, too: you've had the hottest sex of your life, you get that plum job, you muster the courage to write your novel. Everyday across the world, people go through the full and glorious gamut of life - but sometimes, a little advice is needed. For several years, thousands turned to Cheryl Strayed, a then-anonymous internet Agony Aunt. But unlike most Agony Aunts, this one's advice was spun from genuine compassion and informed by a wealth of personal experience - experience that was sometimes tragic and sometimes tender, often hilarious and often heartbreaking. Having successfully battled her own demons while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed sat down to answer the letters of the frightened, the anxious, the confused; and with each gem-like correspondence - of which the best are collected in this volume - she proved t...

Summary from Goodreads : If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given ...

It's the merry month of May! (well, at least I hope it's going to be merry) Here's how I fared for the April Required Reads: 1. The Alienist by Caleb Carr - (4/5 stars) A little bit dragging but I still enjoyed it. It's Victorian CSI meets Sherlock. 2. We Live In Water by Jess Walters - (5/5 stars) It's sad and funny and heartbreaking and bleak and witty...I was very happy about this short story collection. 3. If On a Winter's Night A Traveler...by Italo Calvino - (3/5 stars) Until now, I am not sure how I will manage to churn out a review for this loony book. All I can say, for now, is that it was a unusual reading experience. 4. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed - Unfinished. I am about 80% in. It's pretty good though. May 2014 Required Reads: Visit I Like it Dog-Eared for more information 1. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Me. But I promised myself that this will be the year to try...

Summary from Goodreads : The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels. The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in cr...

Summary from Goodreads: The first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter-a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him one of America's most talked-about writers We Live in Water is a darkly comic, moving collection of stories, published over the last five years in Harper's, McSweeney's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Non-Required Reading, Byliner, Playboy, and elsewhere. The stories veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing. In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns ...

Hello there! The month of March brought with it a couple of changes that left me with little time to read as well as write blog posts. I only managed to finish two from among the four books I set out to read. 1. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin - (5/5 stars) GRRM wasted no time in amping things up in this fifth installment. It's exciting, bizarre, and unpredictable. 2. We Live In Water by Jess Walter - (5/5 stars) I once said that reading this felt like I had a rain cloud over me. The stories have a melancholic tone to them, but they are all very satisfying. I swear. My review will follow suit. 3. The Alienist by Caleb Carr - about 60 %  in  4. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed  - about 25 % in  Okay, so for April I initially decided to have no required reads. I will merely continue and finish (I hope) The Alienist and Tiny Beautiful Things. But then there's....  1. If On a Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino - This is TF...

Talkfest Thursday is a feature that acts as a discussion post of sorts, where I will feature a topic (usually literature related), of my choice, and then proceed to talk about it at great length. This will appear, at least once a month, on a Thursday (or more depending on how cooperative my brain is). The first time that I ever came face to face with a spoiler was about that time when the 6th Happy Potter installment came out. I asked my friend if I could borrow his copy. He, of course, obliged and brought it when we had one of our occasional group lunches at a semi-fancy place. As he handed it over to me, one of my other friends blurted out: "The Half-Blood Prince is (insert name here)." She did not do it to be mean or anything. She is just a spaz like that. But my face collapsed, along with my heart. She realized the gravity of her words and profusely apologized. Heck she continues to do so until now, whenever we remember that particular incident.  #SPOILERALERT   ...