Word: readerly
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...what did the girls like? Anything interactive, especially the quizzes and polls in which you get to see how everyone else answered the same questions. More creative types of interactivity included the friend finder on Bolt, the reader poetry on Gurl and digital snapshots of Alloy members posing with celebrities. The teens also loved Alloy and Bolt's celeb news and gossip, something the more highbrow Kibu eschews. Extras like Alloy's free voice mail and extensive online clothes shopping also got a thumbs-up. Renata, 17, who had already ordered clothes from Alloy, was impressed that they had arrived...
Such distractions from contemplation are, of course, merciful, leaving Kate less time to brood over her mother's inevitable descent toward death. But her attention to detail can sometimes try a reader's patience. When her father, long divorced from her mother, pays a visit, Kate makes them breakfast from "a box of Shredded Wheat for her father (two biscuits carefully broken up in just enough milk to make them edible) and All-Bran for Katherine (with Sweet'n Low because of her diabetes, half a banana, whole milk to encourage weight maintenance)." This is probably too much...
...Some of the exposition, and there is lots of exposition because the book focus on moments, is necessary-watching Ravelstein finger through silks in a Paris boutique, for example. But the reader often longs for something more concrete than the image of an effete, successful intellectual on a Paris shopping binge. The sum of Ravelstein's character is revealed in ordinary interactions, rather than when his intellectual or personal muscles are challenged...
...description of the ethnic conflict submerging the island is dispassionate. Curiously, Ondaatje does not explicitly name the tri-faceted sides of the conflict. For one familiar with the ethnicities involved, this does not present much of a problem. But one imagines that the reader unfamiliar with this international landscape might have some trouble orienting the words Sinhalese and Tamil within the story...
...favorite is the autobiography of Lana Turner, published some years ago. It is a strangely affecting work--eerily earnest, humorless and literal-minded--in which a certain Southern California, film-noir, '40s bleakness persuades the reader, after a hundred pages, that in a former life Lana Turner and Richard Nixon may have been the same person. It is a very spooky experience...