Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writer giddy enough to cast a woman as the hero of a biff-bam adventure series. Just how hard can she bop the bad guys without coming off as an ape in drag? And how much can she fiddle with makeup or fret over runny panty hose before a reader of either sex decides that yeah, yeah, too much verisimilitude is unreal...
...such cases, of course, the reader is honor bound to swallow hard and assume that every word has been made up. Invention gives Kate a pretty, childish mother, who falls in love (literally, as a result of repeated backward-flop trust exercises) with her therapist, a slightly sleazy charmer named Anton. What follows melds The Bobbsey Twins with On the Road. Mom drags the girls across the U.S. to meet her lover at Esalen, the California therapy spa, borrowing gas money from Kate, the sort of wise child who always has some. Then with Anton, his five children...
...Malcolm--turned in part on whether an interview took place over goat cheese at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., or breakfast at Malcolm's Manhattan home. Details matter, especially when they wound real people. Reich is safe: his meals--lunch, breakfast, whatever--were with public figures. Not so the reader who thought Reich was being true to what happened...
...first is an alarming account, told with remarkable calmness by author Nichols, of his single-handed sail from Falmouth, England, most of the way, but not all the way, to Maine. As Nichols puts to sea in dodgy weather, the reader in his armchair considers omens (a necessary and enjoyable preliminary to the sport of reading about other people's mad adventures). Nichols is a highly experienced professional sailor, and Toad, his engineless 27-ft. sloop, is as strong and seaworthy as he and his ex-wife, whom he calls J., could make it. But now the marriage has broken...
Virgil, seen here, is decent, ordinary and a bit slow. Not a good match, the reader feels, for the shrewd Virgil of the next section, who reluctantly accepts the stony verdict of his family and acquaintances, including the local sheriff, that he must kill the man who murdered his wild brother Boyd. The author does his impressive best to make this believable, writing a drunk scene in which Virgil sprawls on his back in the night woods and stares at the Milky Way. Virgil sobers up and, as efficiently as a spy-story villain, creates an elaborate false identity...