Undirected Reading

  I received an electronic ARC of this book through NetGalley for review. This is a well-written, wide-ranging look at the current state of craft cider production in the United States, divided by region. It does a good job of introducing a variety of topics relevant to both the selection and growing of apples and the process of making those apples into cider, while placing each region's cider into a historical and geographical context. This is really neat, and is pretty well-done. It makes for an enjoyable, educational read. There are times that the historical context overpowers the narrative of cider production. Some parts of the book do sort of read like a high school history textbook (though a markedly readable one), and a reader with a good background in US history that touches on social and agricultural history will likely find much of it review. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--it's absolutely vital context, and important to the book's attempt to d...

    I appreciate that this is a charming, ever-popular book. And it's a pleasant, enjoyable book! That said, I never read any of the series as a child, so reading this didn't carry the element of nostalgia that I know it does for many people. (That isn't to say that I wish I would have read it as a child--unfortunately, I am pretty sure I wouldn't have liked it much back then). As it is, I was more interested in the the adults in the story than in Anne herself, but I can easily understand why she is such a beloved character for so many.  

  I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley for review. This is a lovely translation of a book that, while not entirely to my taste, was absolutely worth reading. The statement that the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s is both true and false--the "current" timeline of the novel is one snowy day in which the narrator does not leave her apartment, but the events of the novel span the previous 20 years (and a bit more). It's an interesting story, and while somewhat meandering and not particularly plot-driven, it's enjoyable and avoids becoming confusing. More than anything else, it's a novel about identity and language. The note at the beginning discusses the challenge of translating this particular novel, which apparently in the original is a mixture of Japanese and English that uses a somewhat unusual format to facilitate this stylistic choice. It's really fascinating, and taken together with the translated...