Lower East Side Librarian

Future dystopia space teen love story. Reasonably compelling. Some surprises. Just the kind of thing I like to read these days.

Marie Curie--what a smarty, except for the sleeping with a bottle of radium by her bed. This 28cm tall art biography might just rock your world.

Psychic vs. tarot serial killer. This 1984 novel couldn't be more early 1980s Southern California.

This is one of those popular books that is so popular you don't want to read it, and then it turns out to be as good as the hype. It's a sort of biography/history/science story about the cancer cells of a poor, black mother-of-five who got cancer in a time when medical ethics were more highly evolved for animals than for humans.

Hello, Hunger Games readalike! I can't believe the female co-protagonist wasn't originally imagined as a girl. Ugh. But at least she is now, she, being 15-year-old aristocratic orphan military prodigy June Isparis, who is charged with hunting down her brother's accused killer, an underground hero, also 15, who goes by the name of Day.

One always has to get out of the way that most collections of essays, poems, stories etc. by different authors are uneven in quality and style. I think in this case, more than some others, one's preferences will vary widely. The chapters range from personal diaries to conference presentations, so readers will love some pieces and dislike others, depending on their literary tastes. As a perzine and fiction girl I expected the confessional stories to grab me the most, and some of them did, but I found that the most appealing pieces to me were those that rode the line between scholarly and personal.

I suspect that The Tiger's Wife is a Great Book. I say "suspect" because despite the deft writing and skilled unfolding of the layered stories, I wasn't drawn in. I'm pretty sure it's not the book, it's me. My attention span isn't what it could be right now. Or TW might not be a Good book.