Thoughts on “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is a slim volume, coming in under 200 pages, but it does not feel short or insubstantial. Rather, it seems to me to be a study in how to write a novel that contains precisely what it must contain to achieve the author’s endpoint and nothing …

Thoughts on “Suite Francaise” by Irene Nemirovsky (Audiobook)

Well, I bit the bullet and finished Suite Francaise on audio today. When I’d stopped the day before, I had a feeling that something terrible was about to happen, and I just couldn’t bear more suffering to be inflicted on the poor characters. It did not go the way I feared. On the contrary, I …

Thoughts on “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery (Audiobook)

I’m not usually an audiobook fan. My attention tends to wander, and I end up having to backtrack and listen to the same thing over and over before I actually hear it. Sometimes the narrators are bland, and sometimes they’re a bit too overly dramatic. Just not my thing. At BEA, however, I picked up …