The Mirage (Morland Dynasty #22)

Once again, it’s time for my monthly installment in the Morland family chronicles. The Mirage is the 22nd book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s historical fiction series about the many generations of a single English family. This book begins in 1870, not long before the Franco-Prussian War, which gets some attention in the novel, although most of [...]

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Disgrace (audio)

David Lurie has a pretty good life. He’s moderately successful at his job as a literature professor, and he has hopes of expanding on his Byron studies by writing an opera about Byron. And for his physical needs, he enjoys the “services” of a lovely young woman named Soraya. It’s a perfect arrangement, until he [...]

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Sunday Salon: A Rambly Rant About Genre and Gender

If you spent much time in the literary corners of the Internet this week, you probably got wind of the Franzen-fracas, that is, Jodi Picoult’s and Jennifer Weiner’s irritation at the coverage (over-coverage?) of the release of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom. It started with a couple of snarky tweets from Picoult and Weiner and [...]

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Godric (Roundtable)

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been participating in an online e-mail discussion of Godric by Frederick Buechner as part of Amy’s Faith and Fiction Round Table. The novel is an account of the Medieval hermit and popular (uncanonized) saint Godric of Finchale. This short novel covers the whole of Godric’s life, as told [...]

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Want Books?

Update: All books are claimed. Once again I’m clearing off my bookshelves of some of the books I’ve read recently and don’t anticipate reading again. How can you get one of these for your very own? Just follow these three steps: Choose your book from the list below. Condition of the books varies, so please [...]

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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Daniel Mendelsohn had always been interested in his own family’s genealogy, even when he was a child. As an adult, he eagerly gathered information and stories: the branch of the family that went to Israel, the ones who lived in America, and especially his own beloved grandfather. But there was one family missing: Shmiel, his [...]

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Season of Migration to the North

As this classic novel by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih opens, the narrator is returning to his village after seven years studying in Europe. During the narrator’s time away, a man named Mustafa Sa’eed came to live in the village, and the narrator is alternately irritated and fascinated by him. Soon he learns that Mustafa has [...]

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The Language of God

Subtitled “A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” this book by Francis S. Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and current head of the National Institutes of Health, sets for itself a significant task: To provide evidence for belief. Is that even possible? Perhaps not, but Collins does make a good case for the [...]

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Devotion

Here is what happened. In London on the morning of August 19, 1985, David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, had a violent quarrel on George Street. In a café they came to blows. Two waitresses threw them out. On the sidewalk they started up again. William stumbled backward from the burb and was struck [...]

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Henrietta’s War

Last week, Simon at Stuck in a Book mentioned that he had a weekend of nothing to do but church on Sunday and that he was going to dedicate the whole weekend to novellas. I realized that this past weekend was exactly the same for me, so I decided to polish off at least a [...]

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