I finished reading Housekeeping (by Marilynne Robinson, 1980) several days ago. I haven’t posted a reaction until now, though, because this book, though short, takes some time to settle on a person. It’s a simple enough story: two young sisters are raised by three different female generations of the...
This was last month’s book-club pick , and it has taken me weeks to decide how I feel about it. Actually, I knew how I felt right away but discounted it because it doesn’t seem to match the tide of accolades the book has received. But I just didn’t enjoy it.It seems to have nearly everything I like ...
I have mixed feelings about this book. I presume most readers will enjoy the poetic introspective language used in telling the story of two girls who grow up in a family with a streak of free-spirit in their family heritage. Unfortunately, the term “free-spirit” is in this case may be a euphemism ...
Housekeeping is one of those island books..."if you can take five books to an island..." I first read this book nearly 15 years ago in grad school, and it has never been far away since. My copy is so old I cannot even find an image of the cover! But the cover to the left is good since the railroad b...
On one hand the prose is some of the finest I've read - consistently gorgeous and staggering. On the other hand I found that I dreaded picking this up every single night. (It never was quite as bad as I was expecting though.) The characters and plot were grounded in an unrelenting gritty reality,...
Housekeeping, published in 1980, and nominated for a Pulitzer, appears on many top 100 novels of all time lists. I am not surprised. It is truly a treat.But it is a sad tale. A coming of age story, I suppose, it is all about loss and identity, but told with a poetic lyricism that is delicious.It ope...
I'm three pages into this book, and I can already tell - it's gonna be good.Finished! What a luminous book. Achingly sad, magically told. This is some of the best prose in print. There's not terribly much to the story line, actually - a touching story of a sad family. But the richness of the la...
"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There never had been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I got used to the limits and dimensions o...
I read this after reading Gilead, just to see what Robinson had written twenty or so years before. I wasn't particularly wowed by this as a whole, but it had its moments. I recall the story being downright bizarre at times.Robinson does have a strong gift for addressing matters of the heart, as in ...
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