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Showing posts from January 9, 2006

Reviews: Holiday Reading Roundup

As tends to happen when one is first surrounded by family, then laid low by illness, I've done, I feel, woefully little reading over the Christmas / New Year's holiday. But there are a couple of winners in there, and I want to gush over them before moving on, in future posts, to this year's book world business. (I've realized in reading over this that my stuffy nose may still be making me a little bit cranky, even about books I love, so take my snarkiness with a grain of salt, or a vitamin C.) The New York / Cincinnatti / Denver plane read turned out to be THE WINSHAW LEGACY, OR, WHAT A CARVE UP! by Jonathan Coe (Vintage, originally published 1994). What was I doing reading this? -- it's not even something new, and certainly nothing like JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL by Susanna Clarke, which was last year's plane read and which was what I held up to the staff at Partners and Crime as an exemplar of what I wanted to read. It's the story of Michael Owen, a s