Sunday Salon: Scary Stories

Because today is Halloween, I thought it would be fun to talk about the stories that scare us today. I’ve always considered myself easily scared. My horror of horror began with an ill-advised viewing of The Amityville Horror when I was around eight or nine years old. My brother thought it was very important that [...]

Read Full Post »

So Much for That

For his entire adult life, Shep Knacker has been planning for “The Afterlife”—an early retirement to some third world locale where he and his family can get by on a few dollars a day. His handyman business has kept his family comfortable, with enough to spare that he has been able to put aside a [...]

Read Full Post »

Parrot and Olivier in America

This National Book Award finalist by Peter Carey is, according to the front flap, “an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” I don’t know a thing about de Tocqueville, and I’m not all that curious about him, and this book did nothing to change that. However, my ignorance about the book’s inspiration didn’t particularly [...]

Read Full Post »

Sunday Salon: Taming the Virtual TBR Pile

Since my post last year about my frustration with my growing TBR pile (then at 208 books), I’ve learned to be at peace with the number of unread books in my house. As much as I’d like to have a more reasonable number of unread books (say, 100-ish), I’ve come to terms with the fact [...]

Read Full Post »

The Convent

Books about the cloister or about Roman Catholicism can go a couple of different ways. Sometimes you get the rather devotional, romantic view that ignores the problems within the church, but more often these days, you get books obsessed with everything that’s wrong with church and all the potential dysfunctions in the cloistered life. It [...]

Read Full Post »

The Woman in White (reread)

I first read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White one summer when I was in college. I loved it, absolutely loved it. But as is so often my habit, I forgot almost everything about it within a year or two of reading it. I could remember a few characters’ names (Marian Holcomb, Count Fosco) and [...]

Read Full Post »

Religious Literacy (audio)

Joan of Arc is not Noah’s wife, and Sodom and Gomorrah are not husband and wife. Those are just two basic facts that Stephen Prothero wishes everyone knew. In the 2007 book Religious Literacy, Prothero, a religious studies professor at Boston University, takes on America’s widespread ignorance about religion. This ignorance exists among believers and [...]

Read Full Post »

What Good Is God? In Search of a Faith That Matters

It’s interesting sometimes to go back and revisit the types of books you used to read—note that I said types of books, not actual books. When I revisit books I’ve read before, I carry with me the fond or not-so-fond memories of the previous read, and these affect my subsequent readings. But an entirely new [...]

Read Full Post »

The Color of Earth

This manwha (Korean graphic novel) by Kim Dong Hwa doesn’t fit the usual conception of the graphic novel form. Instead of being an action story or even a memoir, it’s a gentle girl-centric romance. The Color of Earth is the first in a trilogy of novels about the coming of age of a young girl [...]

Read Full Post »

Sunday Salon: Awards Frenzy!

I am an awards junkie. It started when I was still in elementary school and read my first Newbery Award–winning novel. I don’t even remember what the book was (The Witch of Blackbird Pond, perhaps), but I do remember noticing the medal on the cover and deciding to read more books that had won that [...]

Read Full Post »