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Musings of a Book Addict
I'm married to a scavenger of sorts and he often totes home rescued boxes of books that I paw through with shiny, hungry eyes. I pull out the odd and interesting and add them to my teetering stack.
Currently reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
E.B. White: A Biography
Murder on the Orient Express
There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate
Living Buddha, Living Christ
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
The Snare of the Hunter
Paintings of Henry Miller
Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul
Pentimento (Back Bay Books)
I Am Madame X
This book has huge potential. It's based on next to no actual historical documentation of the personal life of the woman in this famous painting (as the Acknowledgements say), so the author could have really created a rich and wild personal life story. Instead, she tells the story of a vapid, self-obsessed, angry woman who literally obsesses about her looks through the entire novel, and yet has no emotional reaction to getting old, which she inevitably does. I'd much rather read the story of the (so-called) heroine's aunt Julie and her women painter friends, living it up as creative, free women in Paris at the turn of the century. The author gives us some little side story gems about these women - just enough to draw me in, only to deny me a fully satisfying story. The author does, however, immerse us in the history and politics of Paris in the late 1800's that is fascinating and entrancing.