If I’m ever going to catch up with my reviews, I am going to have to post multiple reviews at once and make them a little (read: a lot) shorter than normal. Maybe you’ll like that? Or maybe you want all the juicy deets? It is what it is. Let’s begin with my Christmas reads.…
I am in a book club that just throws a book at you at a club meeting, and it’s the book you’re meant to read for the next club. There is no preamble, no warning, no sneak peek. Sometimes this works for me, and sometimes it baffles me: should I read this book? I know…
I have been reading romance novels now and again over the past few years, maybe half a dozen. But now that I get advance listener copies as a bookseller, I am “trying out” audio books at a much faster rate. Many of these books happen to be romance, and since I am curious about many…
The Astronomer by Brian Biswas is several things. It is a magical realism-verging-on-speculative novel, though it is comprised of short stories that have been strung together and bracketed with other short stories that give a Victorian-style faux-outsider perspective. The story (which contains everything from Greek mythology to existential considerations) is told in short bursts that…
I’m not sure that A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende’s most lauded work. I have been meaning to read her, but I started here only because it was a book club thing. This is one of Allende’s more recent books (2019, out of the 28 listed on her site; she’s published four…
I felt like I was doing cartwheels while reading Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and I mean that in a good way. Or like I was watching Garmus do cartwheels. Her writing style, characters, and plot are so free-wheeling. The subject matter is often sad, serious, and even brutal, but somehow this book is…
I have been to three “readings” lately, at local bookstores. If you haven’t been to a reading, I suggest that you go to one and make sure to buy a book while you are there. Readings are interesting and cool and they are in danger of becoming extinct if people don’t show up, just as…
I have read Life of Pi a couple of times and I like it. I have reasons, and I’ll give them to you in a sec. I also always leave it a little disappointed. I think my main beef with this book is that Yann Martel tried too hard to sell us his perceived moral.…
Sometimes themes just happen. Native American-colonist relations in the 1750s in middle grades literature is a theme that just happened to me, hardcore. As you can see, my last two reviews were Calico Captive and The Sign of the Beaver, and now I am about to review Lynne Reid Banks’ Indian in the Cupboard. I…
I may have let this book build up too much before reading it. I have been intending to read it for years. It was recommended by lots of people as well as generally the state of North Carolina. It is magic realism, which is my favorite genre. And I love the movie, am a huge…
I have been surprised just how many books I already owned have surprised me in the past several weeks. Yes, I meant that sentence to read that way, but now it strikes me as awkward. Ah, well. Since I started Book a Day (which would be going much better if I didn’t keep misplacing the…
I had seen the movie. It was popular, in its time, with the kids. I wasn’t especially impressed. But I knew that didn’t mean I wouldn’t like the book. So when I found myself at a Cracker Barrell in upstate New York, facing a solo twelve-hour drive and perusing the audio book rentals, this one…
I must have been writing this review in my head while reading this book, because I feel like I already wrote it. I looked on the blog, I looked in the blog drafts, and I even searched through my Word file. Nothing. Must have been in my head. Why? Because this book is so surprising.…
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, literary giant, died almost one month ago. Known affectionately as “Gado,” Marquez was first made internationally famous by his magic realism novel, One hundred years of solitude, and it remained his most famous and revered (a classic of the twentieth century), along with Love in the Time of Cholera. He won the…
the starving artist 