Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower #4)

The Wastelands ended with Roland and his ka-tet in terrible jeopardy, riding through the waste lands in a maniacal riddle-obsessed train called Blaine. I suppose, since the series has seven books, it’s no great surprise to learn that the next book, Wizard and Glass, begins with the group making its escape from Blaine and continuing [...]

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The Aeneid, Books 7-12

My last post about the Aeneid mentioned that I found it both familiar and strange: episodes like the attack of the Harpies or the tour of the Underworld that I already knew from other sources, finally here in the original. I was also reading some material from the Iliad and the Odyssey from a fresh [...]

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Fair Food

One of the most life-changing books I’ve read in recent years was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Since reading that book, I’ve started cutting back on processed food, cooking from scratch, and eating local or organic food almost exclusively. I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to do that. But even as I’ve changed my personal [...]

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Sunday Salon: Deep or Broad?

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out that I like to read a lot of different kinds of books (as does Jenny). One week, I might be reading Stephen King, then Charlotte Brontë, then Kazuo Ishiguru, and then Sarah Vowell. I read from different genres, different periods, [...]

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The Aeneid, Books 1-6

Well, it’s the end of August, and the Aeneid is the last entry in My Big Fat Greek and Roman Summer. (That sounded better in my head. Wet Hot Greek and Roman Summer? 500 Days of Greek and Roman Summer? Okay, I may be slightly delirious.) Arma virumque cano, says Virgil, and we’re off. The Aeneid, of course, is [...]

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I, Claudius

When I first mentioned on Twitter that I was reading I, Claudius, a bunch of people piped up to say what a good book it is, even that it’s one of their favorites. I had watched and enjoyed the BBC miniseries several years ago and was pretty excited to finally get around to the book, [...]

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The Book Thief (abandoned)

My usual rule, when reading a book that’s just not doing it for me, is to give a book 50 pages or 10% of its length, whichever is longer. I allowed Markus Zusak and his narrator, Death, twice that long this time, willing myself  to get into The Book Thief. But 120 pages in, I gave up. [...]

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The Polysyllabic Spree

For five years between 2003 and 2008, Nick Hornby was a book blogger. Columnist! Sorry! Columnist! I said blogger because… well, as I was reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer magazine between September 2003 and December 2004, I felt like I was reading a particularly [...]

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A Study in Scarlet

After reading the new Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel Pirate King (review to come) and watching (again) the finale of Sherlock, I had a yen this past weekend to go back to the source and read an original Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve hardly read any of the [...]

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Staying Put

This collection of essays by Scott Russell Sanders is called Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Sanders has lived in Bloomington, Indiana, in the same two-story house, on the same street, with the same wife, since 1974. In this rootless and restless country, he says, that’s come to be unusual. What effect does it have [...]

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