A plethora of book reviews

So, as you may have noticed, I've been doing a lot of reading and not a lot of blog posting (other than cross posting my Goodreads reviews). I was waiting for TLOS crits to come back and, to distract myself, I immersed myself in my TBR shelves. It was so wonderful! It has also helped me inch towards my goal of reading 52 books this year. Woo!

The crits are trickling back in now, though, so I'll be back at work with TLOS in the evenings (and on my lunch and on the bus and...) so my reading time will be trimmed back. And hopefully it'll start looking more like a blog and less like a Goodreads mirror around here. :)

One last note before I quit yammering about my recent reads, though... I cannot stop thinking about the book EDINBURGH by Alexander Chee. My original review/post was just a couple of lines because, as sometimes happens with books that really churn me up inside, I was having a hard time articulating my thoughts and feelings about the book. But I really think that pretty much the entire world should read this book--that everyone could learn something about love and loss by reading this book. So I'm going to give it a little more blog space (and a few more sentences) here...

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

My (slightly) expanded review:

This story broke my heart a hundred different ways. One of the most beautiful, piercing novels I've ever read.

Chee's writing is breathtaking, gracefully shepherding the reader through the abuse Fee endures and the slow, inevitable breakdown he suffers before finding the courage to reinhabit his life.

Highly recommended to everyone.


Go. Buy. Love. Amazon | B&N | Indiebound [incidentally, at the time of this post, Amazon is offering it in trade paperback at a $6.00 bargain price...)