Posts under ‘Book Reviews’

Oh, Jane Eyre, how I do enjoy you. You’ve got everything: the plucky orphan, the brooding Byronic hero, the madwoman tucked up in the attic. You are great. Now, does everybody know the story of Jane Eyre? It was first published in 1847 and has been made into a movie no less than 19 separate [...]

Some of you may have read Connie Willis’s other time-travel novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and may subsequently have the impression that her books are just barrels of smart and witty laughs and giggles. Please allow me to correct this impression: Doomsday Book is smart and full of time-travelling Oxfordians, but humourous it [...]

Over the last year or two my brother and I have both chewed our way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series like a couple of termites through wood. But I finished reading the last one quite a few months ago — perhaps close to a year, in fact — and I’ve been hesitant to pick them [...]

One of the problems with reading an entire series back-to-back is that you start to see all the little things that the author — and his editor — didn’t. Like how minor characters sometimes mysteriously change the spelling or their names between books. And their genders. And their entire characterizations. Or how the main character’s [...]

Once upon a time, when I was in grade eight, my English teacher made the class read a book called Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. To this day, I think that it’s the only book that I’ve actually expressed a desire to burn. I thought that it was terrible — a very babyish book for grade [...]

I was severely sceptical of this book when it first came out, for three main reasons: because of all the hoopla, because it was written by two authors, and because I thought that the title was, besides being unwieldy, extremely dumb — all of which give me the willies. But I finally cracked, and I [...]

This is a book that you’re either going to love or loathe, because it is absolutely crazy. C-R-A-Z-Y. Crazy. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was written by Amos Tutuola, a 20th-century Nigerian author. Tutuola was very briefly educated under the British system (Nigeria then being a colony) but led a largely unremarkable life [...]

This book is exquisite. Seriously: the prose is so good that I want to roll around in it. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume I: The Pox Party) is exquisitely written, and tells the story of one Octavian Gitney, a boy slave raised by a New England philosophical society just [...]