Archive for June 9th, 2009

Absorbing and quietly magical, with scads of feminine energy and colonial oppression. An interesting work when paired against Allende’s master work, The House of Spirits, which I read within a month of this novel. Allende chooses appealing patterns for her characters, giving us something that is both an easy pleasure and a satisfying literary read.

Yesterday my gastroenterologist (Dr. Gravitas, his blog-pseudonym) was sitting next to me “brainstorming,” as he called it, about why it was that I felt so vaguely (but convincingly) bad. We were in one of the GI examing rooms in the Portland Clinic, which I should mention (now as good a time as any) are some [...]