The Dark Tower (Dark Tower #7)

The final volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series begins with a bang as Jake, Oy, and Pere Callahan burst into the Dixie Pig to rescue Susannah as she and Mia give birth to the mysterious child Susannah has been carrying for the last three volumes of the series. Before long, the ka-tet is reunited [...]

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Sunday Salon: Looking Ahead

As December approaches, my mind is turning toward finishing out the year and my plans for next year. I don’t like to set a lot of formal goals for my reading, especially not ones guided by numbers. My main goal, always, is to enjoy my reading, and anything beyond that starts to feel like work. [...]

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River of Smoke

When we last left the characters in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, at the end of the marvelous Sea of Poppies, they were floating off to different fates at the brink of the Opium Wars. It was impossible to know whether these people we had come to care for, and whose lives had been so strangely [...]

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Comfort Reading (and a little discomfort)

I think I’ve mentioned here before that I used to re-read all the time. It seems that in my youth and adolescence, I scarcely did anything but re-read, and had to be prodded into reading anything new. These days, however, I have the strong sense of the sea of books-I-have-yet-to-read, and I almost never find [...]

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Sunday Salon: Friday Reads and Paid Content

This past Friday, there was a bit of a firestorm on Twitter when participants in the popular #fridayreads meme learned that some of the meme’s organizers were getting paid to promote books to the Friday Reads community. As is typical with Twitter controversies, the conversation quickly went from people asking questions to people making accusations [...]

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The Marriage Plot (audio)

The title of Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel refers to an old-fashioned sort of novel in which the central question is whether and who the heroine (usually, but sometimes the hero as well) will marry. These novels by Jane Austen, Henry James, and George Eliot were what drew Madeleine, the heroine of The Marriage Plot to [...]

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I Heard the Owl Call My Name

According to the Kwakiutl people, if you hear an owl call your name, your death is imminent. When Margaret Craven’s novel opens, young Anglican vicar Mark Brian, newly assigned to the Kwakiutl town of Kingcome, hasn’t yet heard the owl, but he is gravely ill and doesn’t know it. His bishop, knowing that Mark is [...]

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The Dancing Years (Morland Dynasty #33)

The penultimate volume in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Morland Dynasty series covers the years immediately after World War I. The Morlands, now reunited with spouses, children, and friends who served in the war and grieving the ones who didn’t return, attempt to return to normal life and put the horrors of the past few years behind them. [...]

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Pnin

When Nabokov’s wonderful, delightful, lovely novel Pnin opens, Professor Timofey Pnin is on the wrong train. The entire introductory chapter follows his misadventure (entirely his own fault, as it happens), as he gets off the train, loses his valise, misses his bus, has what appears to be some sort of nostalgic heart attack, merging him [...]

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Ha’penny

In Farthing, the first book of this alternate-history trilogy, Jo Walton set the stage: instead of conducting the Battle of Britain, a group of well-connected, upper-crust families overthrew Churchill and concluded what came to be known as the “Farthing Peace.” Under the direction of these families, the country began a gentle descent into fascism: loss [...]

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