Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster, 2009) I was pleased to see that more than half of the Orange Prize shortlisted titles -- including this novel -- were still unread in my stacks. Reading the longlist was a crazy undertaking (see more talk of
I thought about trying to dress it up, but the lame, oh-so-pathetic fact of the matter is that I didn't do any better in week two than I did in week one: my poetry muscle remains enthusiastic but unexercised. I trekked my book along loyally for this, third, Wednesday (books
So, here's the thing. I'm reading like a fiend this year. And it's been making me a little crazy. Pleasantly crazy. But crazy all the same. And I look at the list of books I've read and I start to believe that spending every spare second reading is a balanced
Attica Locke's Black Water Rising Harper Collins, 2009 So if I was relieved to see how relatively short Laila Lalami's The Secret Son was, when I picked it up from the library, as part of my insane Read-the-Orange-Prize-Longlist plan, you can imagine how disheartened I was to see how relatively
These two jumped out at me because I have gotten the Spider Bathtub Rescue down to a science. Or, given the array of materials I keep on hand, perhaps it would be better described as an artform? Although it's particularly hard when they're very young spiders, the almost see-through kind:
