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.…
We’ll begin with a list that you’ll find nowhere else: My Best Reads of 2025. It’s possible that not a single book on this list was published in 2025, just that I read it in 2025. (Turns out a few of them were published this year. See asterisks.) Some of them were published hundreds of…
I like to pay attention to the literary prize winners. To a certain extent, you can trust that they’ll sift through a whole lot of books (though not even close to all the books) and come up with some good reads. Not all of them will jive with you, sure, but it’s a good place…
Earlier this year, I discovered that I might not hate Pulitzer Prize winners. For years, I had been reacting to The Goldfinch, which I reviewed here and am not a fan of. Also, I don’t get people’s love of it. So I had written off the Pulitzer. (Maybe there was more to that emotional decision,…
I am one of those people who likes seasons. And I don’t just mean winter, spring, summer, and autumn. I mean the seasons of life, the holiday seasons, etc. Which means that when Halloween is fast-approaching in the heart of harvest time, I am ordering spiced lattes, baking bone cookies, and streaming Wednesday. It also…
This book came out of left field, but I am so glad it did. I am in this one book club (out of seven) that reads kinda whatever these two guys (okay, they own the bookstore) choose, at least most months. They don’t reveal the next month’s read until everyone is sitting around discussing the…
Oh, I have some things to say about Kerri Maniscalco’s Stalking Jack the Ripper. The first thing is that I did not actually finish this book. I’m being honest. But I read more than half and attended a book club, listening to lots of other opinions (plus reading reviews online). (I also skipped ahead and…
I don’t think I’d read Persuasion by Jane Austen, before. I have seen versions as movies. But I hadn’t read it. Now that I have, the only one left is Mansfield Park. Synopsis: Anne Eliot is a lonely, isolated almost-spinster at 27. She was engaged, 8 years ago, to a man she loved. But that…
Number two in my reading-Hamlet-adaptations is Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower, a stand-alone and her first fantasy (as opposed to sci-fi) book (from 2019). She’s a Hugo-Nebula-Arthur C. Clarke-BSFA award winner. The Raven Tower is not one I hear mentioned frequently (or ever), and as I said, I started reading it because it was listed…
Perhaps I should have DNFed this one and put it in the ALC (advanced listener copy) graveyard where it could have avoided any scathing reviews. But I didn’t. As some of you may recall, I have been listening to advance reader copies of books as a bookseller, which allows me to weed out some books…
Not all of us are devoted romance readers. Not all of us are on the ol’ BookTok following the “smut” lit comedy and reviewers. I guess we no longer call a certain type of romance literature erotica? Because there is a scale, instead. On one end of the scale, Anne of the Island, the third…
Is it still summer? Is it the fall? Is it back to school? I suppose it depends on where you are in the country (and the world) and what your schoolyear calendar looks like. Here, school started ages ago (three weeks for my young adult and teen but in July for my year-round nephews), and…
I have been told since the drop of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead that I needed to read it. So, when The Empusium showed up on bookshelves this year with its cool cover and then winkled its way onto one of my book clubs’ lists, I jumped at the…
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…
Series review, which is also a book review. Yes, Monk and Robot is a series. It is also a book, but let’s give that italics: Monk and Robot, by Becky Chambers. You see, the two books of the Monk and Robot series—Psalm for the Wild-Built and Prayer for the Crown-Shy—are novellas and, like the Murderbot…
When the woman leading our book club discussion of Real Americans by Rachel Khong said that Khong writes without a plan, little gears aligned in my head and I thought, “Of course she doesn’t!” I can’t guarantee that she’s one of those “outlines are below me” authors, but it would fit. (For my opinions on…
NEW PUBLICATIONS: Since it’s already July, some of these are already on the shelves and some of them are at the top of the charts. Sorry if I’m wrong about a couple of them. I plan to read The Hounding, Flashlight, Katabasis, Atmosphere, The Girls Who Grew Big, Run for the Hills, My Friends, and…
I had almost no expectations when I bought Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and then slid it from the shelf then opened it to read it in the few days I had left for this book-club-read. I’m happy with the cover, but it would be impossible to set a reader up for exactly what they’re going…
I have a lot to say about Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. So I’m going to fly through the reviews as best I can. Synopsis: Loved Demon Copperhead. Made me look back and realize I actually like most of the Pulitzer-winners that I’ve read. (The Goldfinch had me feeling…
How many times did I say it over the years? I read everything except horror and romance. I guess at some point I amended it to erotica and horror, but still—I do read horror, sometimes, on very special occasions, for very special reasons. In fact, I’m about to read Children of Solitude because I heard…
the starving artist 