Endurance

The last book I read about polar exploration (a happy, if strange, little hobby of mine) was Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s splendid memoir, The Worst Journey in the World. That book told in self-deprecating but riveting prose the story of R.F. Scott’s doomed Terra Nova expedition, the one that failed to beat Roald Amundsen to the South [...]

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Sunday Salon: Extending the Virago Celebration

Today is the final day of Rachel and Carolyn‘s wonderful Virago Reading Week. What a wonderful week of celebrating books by and about women! My own Virago Modern Classics experience is limited, mostly involving books by such household names as Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and the Brontës—and I don’t believe I’ve read any of those in [...]

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Love in the Time of Cholera

There are certain novels on my TBR list that have been there so long, I hardly see them any more. Even when Teresa glowingly reviewed Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, last year, I said to myself, I have got to get around to that, and I never did. But when [...]

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Spinster

When Rachel and Carolyn announced that they were planning a Virago Reading Week for this week, I was very excited. I’ve gathered a nice little collection of Virago Modern Classics, several of them editions with the iconic green spine well known by Virago lovers; perhaps this week would motivate me to finally take one off [...]

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The Oresteia

This trilogy of sixth-century plays by Aeschylus — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides – traces part of a longer, grimmer family history. These three plays, at first glance, are about the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytaemnestra, and then their son Orestes’ revenge of his father. But the story is laced with references that go back generations. [...]

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Silence (reread)

I first read Shusaku Endo’s extraordinary novel Silence roughly eight years ago, and it has continued to haunt me. In fact, I’d put it on the short list of novels that have changed my life. It put me on a train of thought about God and faith and suffering and strength that led me places [...]

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Second Sight

I’ve written about Charles McCarry’s spy novels here before, but I have to say it again: I don’t know why he’s not more popular, a best-seller, a classic novelist in the genre like Le Carré. Unlike my other favorite spy novelist, Alan Furst, his writing isn’t lush and atmospheric. Instead, it’s cool and clean and [...]

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The Fates Will Find Their Way

It was Halloween night when 16-year-old Nora Liddell went missing. Last seen (perhaps) getting into a beat-up Catalina near the bus station, Nora vanished from her upper-middle-class suburb, never to be heard from again. But in Hannah Pittard’s debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, her absence renders her present in a way her [...]

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Sunday Salon: Book Monogamy

One of the things book blogging has opened my eyes to is the wide diversity in people’s reading habits, and one area where I see a lot of variety is in the number of books people might have on the go at any one time. Some folks are definitely in the one-book-at-a-time camps, and others [...]

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum

I’ve been a fan of Kate Atkinson’s since a couple of years ago, when I read her three Jackson Brodie mysteries and then Human Croquet. Teresa fell in love with her shortly thereafter, when she read the Brodie mysteries, Emotionally Weird, and Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Teresa’s review of this latter book, Atkinson’s [...]

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