Sunday Salon: Difficult Books

Although I generally enjoy book reviews more than anything else on book blogs, every Sunday, I enjoy opening up my Google Reader and seeing everyone’s Sunday Salon posts. Because I enjoy reading these posts so much, I thought it might me fun to join in with my own weekly post on some bookish topic that’s on [...]

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The Emperor (Morland Dynasty #11)

The Emperor is the 11th book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Morland Dynasty series, a series that explores English history through the eyes of one Yorkshire family. This book begins in 1795 and covers the early years of Napoleon’s rule in Europe. These years require several of the Morlands to go to sea and do battle with the French, [...]

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (audio; reread)

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke has to be one of my top-five favorite books of the last 10 years. Published in 2004, this novel presents an alternate history of the early 19th century, one in which two magicians restore magic to England. Strange and Norrell, the two magicians, use their magic to serve the English [...]

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Brooklyn

Brooklyn. The title probably conjures up images of urban life, of generations of families of many different ethnicities living together, each in its own enclave. A book with such a title would have to be massive if it were to tell the story of a place with such a rich and diverse culture. But Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is [...]

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The Rapture

Back in my pre-blogging days, I read and enjoyed Liz Jensen’s The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, so when I saw that her publisher was offering up review copies of her latest novel, released August 11, I was eager to get a copy. Set in England in the near future, The Rapture is an apocalyptic eco-thriller about [...]

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Passion and Affect

Passion and Affect, a collection of absurdly wonderful short stories by Laurie Colwin, was published in 1974. Oddly, it’s the first thing Colwin published and the last fiction of hers I’ve read, or will ever read: she died in 1992, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. She was only 48 years old. I risk sounding a little [...]

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The Wilderness

Last year, I spent much of the late summer and early fall reading any of the books on the Booker long list that I could easily get my hands on. Even though I enjoyed the experience, I had no intention of attempting to read the Booker long list this year—until I saw the list itself. [...]

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The Year of Magical Thinking (reread)

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. These are the lines that open Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. They are also the first lines that she wrote after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart [...]

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The Spies of Warsaw

In Alan Furst’s deliciously atmospheric The Spies of Warsaw, Colonel Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon is working for the Warsaw branch of the French intelligence service. 1937 is a bad year for a lot of people in Eastern Europe, and many of them cross Mercier’s path: Russian émigrés, German informants, Polish Jews, Romanian fugitives. Mercier served in [...]

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The Mysterious Benedict Society

ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES? In the first few pages of The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart, this is the newspaper advertisement that Reynie Muldoon, an eleven-year-old living in Stonetown Orphanage, decides to answer. When Reynie arrives at the testing site with his pencil in hand, he must pass [...]

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