Double Review: Doll and Lullaby

In my last post, I mentioned that my favorite genre used to be mysteries. And when you love mysteries, there’s nothing better than to find a really prolific author you really like. Back in my college days, I was lucky enough to come across the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain (a pseudonym for Evan [...]

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The Train Now Departing

Years ago, I read almost nothing but mysteries. They were my favorite genre. I can vaguely remember reading a few of Martha Grimes’s novels, the ones with the names of old pubs in the title: The Man With a Load of Mischief; The Old Fox Deceiv’d. But they didn’t grab my attention in any really [...]

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Moral Disorder

I love Margaret Atwood’s… how shall I put it?… non-science-fiction-fiction. I’ve enjoyed her dystopias, too, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, but the books I’ve loved, the ones that have driven me to read them over and over, are books that take place in our own space and time: Cat’s Eye, for instance, [...]

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A Clockwork Orange (audio)

A banda of bazoomy malchiks roam the streets high on moloko looking for a bit of the old ultra-violence. Razrezzing a starry vesh’s books from the local biblio is just the beginning. The boots on their nogas are perfectly suited for kicking, so when a vesh is down, they kick him in the gulliver. These [...]

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Howards End (reread)

It would probably be overselling it to say that this is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, but I’m going to say it anyway because I think it’s true. I first read Howards End, widely regarded as E.M. Forster’s masterpiece, in college. I was not pleased to be reading it because [...]

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Sunday Salon: More Book Binging

After my huge spree at the Green Valley Book Fair this month, I decided to throw caution to the wind and make July a month of acquiring with abandon. So today when I went to the Daedalus Books Warehouse with Frances and Thomas, I didn’t hold back. Daedalus is a warehouse of remaindered books in [...]

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War on the Margins

It’s 1940. A young woman working in the Aliens Office in Jersey reads the order to begin taking registrations of Jews. Does this order apply to me? she wonders. Her father was Jewish, but she has never practiced the faith and doesn’t have more than two Jewish grandparents, which the order says deems a person [...]

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The Outcast (Morland Dynasty #21)

When I read The Winter Journey, the 20th book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Morland Dynasty series, I suspected that the groundwork was being laid for a book about the U.S. Civil War. My suspicions were confirmed in The Outcast. Roughly half of the novel is set in the U.S., where one of the younger Morlands has [...]

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The Animal Family

Well, I’m finally back from a two-week-long vacation, during which I got almost no reading done at all. This must be the first vacation of my entire life where I took more books along than I read: I hauled four or five and read only one. This horrifying set of events came about because it [...]

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Sunday Salon: The Siren Song of the Shiny New Book

Yesterday on Twitter, Vasilly linked to this LA Weekly piece by Nathan Ihara about how new books seem to get all the attention. Pick up the paper or the latest magazine and turn to the book review section, and all the featured books are new (unless there happens to be a high-profile reissue of a [...]

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