Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

August 21, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Riverhead Books, 2009. Originally published 1998. 480 pgs. Purchased. In the afterward to my Kindle edition, Waters sums up the plot of her novel in the most perfect way possible: “…oh dear, how lurid it sounded, how improbable, above all how niche — the tale of a Victorian oyster girl [named Nancy] who loses her heart to a male impersonator, becomes her partner in bed and on the music-hall stage, and then, cruelly abandoned, has a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom • Tags: Sarah Waters

The Buried by Peter Hessler

May 29, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Penguin Press, 2019. 480 pgs. Purchased. After years of living and working in China as a journalist for The New Yorker,Hessler moved with his wife, Leslie, and infant twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. The same year the Egyptian Arab Spring began, resulting in the overthrow of the dictator Hosni Mubarak and the election of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi. As Hessler documents in his book, Morsi would serve as president for barely a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Chunkster, LGBTQA+, Nonfiction • Tags: Peter Hessler

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

March 5, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition.  Riverhead, 2014. 568 pgs. Purchased. In the aftermath of World War I, twenty-six year old Frances Wray and her mother are obliged to take in paying guests — a more polite term for lodgers that allows Mrs. Wray and the neighbors to ignore the family’s rather spectacular tumble in social standing. Their room for rent notice is answered by a young, married couple from the “clerk class” named Lilian and Leonard Barber, and the Wrays and Barber have […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Crime, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom, Women's Prize • Tags: Sarah Waters

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

March 29, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Picador, 2003. Originally published 2002. 529 pgs. Purchased. Last week was Rainbow Week at my university. Rainbow Week is a celebration of GLBTQ students as well as a week to raise awareness about issues affecting these students. For example, trying to establish gender neutral bathrooms so that no student is forced to make a statement about their gender every single day. I didn’t decide to read Eugenides’ novel for this reason, but it did fit in nicely […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Chunkster, Fiction, LGBTQA+, North America, United States • Tags: Jeffrey Eugenides