Mikael Blomkvist is in trouble. He’s a Swedish financial journalist, editor of a hard-hitting magazine called Millennium, and he’s being sued for libel: it turns out that the story he published about a wealthy and corrupt financier was false from beginning to end, and he didn’t have a scrap of proof for it. He’ll have [...]
Archive for the ‘Contemporary’ Category
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on October 11, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Poe’s Children
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 29, 2009 | 12 Comments »
If you bought a bag of apples, and only a third of them were worth eating, would you complain to the store? If you bought a lawn mower, and it only cut the grass a third of the time (or worse, a third of your blades of grass), would you return it?
Poe’s Children, a collection [...]
Home Cooking
Posted in Contemporary, Food, Nonfiction on September 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As you can see from my reviews of Passion and Affect and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Laurie Colwin is one of my favorite contemporary authors. For me, her writing is exactly right, like having precisely what you want to eat when you’re hungry: tart lemonade on a hot day, or a soup with [...]
The Tender Bar
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on September 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I read J.R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar for my book club. We usually read mysteries, but in this case the owner of the restaurant where we meet offered to buy our dinners if we read this book and discussed it with him. We weren’t about to turn that down!
JR was the only son of a [...]
Infinite Jest
Posted in Contemporary, Speculative Fiction on September 17, 2009 | 16 Comments »
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling postmodern 1,079-page tome, was the center of a summer-long project called Infinite Summer. I had been curious about this book for years, and this opportunity to read and discuss it with others motivated me to finally give it a try. It’s difficult to sum up such a complex book [...]
Human Croquet
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on September 8, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet begins with a forest: the unfathomably old forest of England, created hundreds of thousands of years before human beings arrived there. At the heart of this forest is Glebelands, the estate (eventually) of the formidable de Breville family, who in the sixteenth century briefly had a young tutor named William Shakespeare. At [...]
Mister Pip
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on September 7, 2009 | 11 Comments »
On an unnamed island near Australia, trouble is brewing. The redskins, who work for the white Australians, have come in to put down the rebels, and the island has been cut off from commerce with the outside world: no more electricity, no more medicines. The islanders could be worse off. They still have fish in [...]
Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Memoir on September 2, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I suspect that Me Cheeta is the most unconventional book to make the Booker longlist this year. Ostensibly a memoir by Cheeta, the chimpanzee from the Tarzan films, the book is really a parody of the Hollywood tell-all. “Cheeta” writes of his discovery, his experiences on the Tarzan sets, and his many encounters with Hollywood stars. [...]
The Rapture
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on August 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Back in my pre-blogging days, I read and enjoyed Liz Jensen’s The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, so when I saw that her publisher was offering up review copies of her latest novel, released August 11, I was eager to get a copy.
Set in England in the near future, The Rapture is an apocalyptic eco-thriller about a [...]
The Wilderness
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on August 13, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Last year, I spent much of the late summer and early fall reading any of the books on the Booker long list that I could easily get my hands on. Even though I enjoyed the experience, I had no intention of attempting to read the Booker long list this year—until I saw the list itself. [...]
