The Iliad, Books 9-16

Someone made a comment on my last post on the Iliad that she was intimidated to read this work, and reading back over my post, I can see that I didn’t say all I meant to. My observations are a bit scattered, and I didn’t talk enough about what an absorbing experience it was to read this book. Part [...]

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The Waste Lands (Dark Tower #3)

When we last left Roland and his friends, the Drawing of the Three had just been completed — the ka-tet without whom the quest for the Dark Tower could not continue. Eddie Dean, former junkie; Susannah Dean, former schizophrenic; and Jack Mort, former psychopath — all had been drawn according to their fate. Jenny: If [...]

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The Iliad, Books 1-8

I’m sure you’ve all been on tenterhooks, wondering when I was going to get on with my Summer of Greek and Roman Classics. Tenterhooks! Well, here I am, back again, with Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad. You may remove yourselves from the hooks, on your tenter. Reading the Iliad (the reference is to Ilium, [...]

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Children of Men

This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper. —T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” In P.D. James’s 1992 novel, Children of Men, the world is ending, and with a whimper. It is 2021, and all the men on Earth have suddenly and for no clear reason become infertile. There have [...]

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When We Were Orphans (audio)

Christopher Banks is a great detective, but Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about him is hardly a typical detective story. A huge chunk of the book is Christopher’s reminiscences about his childhood in the International Settlement in Shanghai. There, he and his best friend, a Japanese boy named Akira, played together, had friendly disputes, and scared each [...]

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Spirits of Just Men

Subtitled “Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World,” Charles Thompson’s Spirits of Just Men is the second book I’ve read in the past year about the industry that made the county where I grew up (sort of) famous. The first book, Matt Bondurant’s The Wettest County in the World, is [...]

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Beekeeping for Beginners

Many of you probably know by now that I’m a huge fan of Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell mysteries. I try to get every Russell book as soon as it comes out, and I’ve loved every one of them. And right now, there’s a feast of Russell fun going on, what with the release of [...]

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The Gormenghast Novels

First things first: Even though Mervyn Peake wrote three books about Titus Groan and Gormenghast, these books aren’t really a trilogy. Had Peake lived longer, there would have been more; indeed, his wife, Maeve Gilmore, expanded on his rudimentary notes to write a fourth book, Titus Awakes, which is being published this month. In truth, [...]

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Sunday Salon: Reading Generously

None of us read in a vacuum. What we choose to read, what we expect of our books, and how we approach our reading is often affected by other people’s opinions. I often hear people talk of this phenomenon as if it were a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. One area where I [...]

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The Sibyl in Her Grave

You guys. YOU GUYS. There is a fourth mystery by Sarah Caudwell! Wait. Let me begin at the beginning. Back in the early ’90s, I discovered Caudwell’s books. There were three of them, legal whodunits that read like a glass of champagne: fizzy, light, intoxicatingly delicious. Each of them revolves around a legal crime, investigated and [...]

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