Out With a Whimper Disappointment, thy name is Jeff Lindsay. It was abundantly clear long ago that Lindsay had fallen into a rut with his Dexter series, that the magic had gone away and he was just going through the motions. I mean honestly, it reached the point where virtually every book had the same … More Book Review: Dexter Is Dead, by Jeff Lindsay
The downside of Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries is that their secrets have fallen victim to their own success. Particularly in the internet age, it’s hard to avoid spoilers. Christie’s play The Mousetrap famously kept its ending a secret in the mainstream press despite being the longest-running play in history until its Wikipedia page repeatedly … More Book Review: Murder On the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
Well this was very disappointing. I purchased a mass market copy of American Gods when it first arrived in paperback in 2002 or 2003. I finally got around to reading it in July of 2015, which means it was one of those books that sits around on your to-read pile for an inexplicably long time … More Book Review: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
“You never know what’s in a person’s heart until they’re tested, do you?” I’ve been a fan of the movie adaptation Fried Green Tomatoes for a great many years. I also enjoyed Fannie Flagg on countless episodes of The Match Game thanks to reruns on The Game Show Network, so it was with great joy and … More Book Review: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg
“Knowledge was more powerful than fear. Love was stronger than hate.” You know when a book is reasonably enjoyable, but the last ten pages are so terrible that it ruins the whole experience? Not just ruins the whole book even, but makes you so mad you want to chuck the book across the room and … More Book Review: Shine, by Lauren Myracle
“The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)” Dept. of Speculation first caught my eye when The New York Times Book Review called it one of the top 10 books of 2014, but it wasn’t until I read more about it in The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books that I really felt … More Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill: Book Review
Detective Rizzoli and M.E. Maura Isles are back in one of Rizzoli and Isles’ most gruesome adventures yet. In a series known for grisly murders, that says quite a bit. You see, avid hunter and taxidermist Leon Gott has just been found eviscerated and hanging upside down in his own home. As if that wasn’t … More Book Review: Die Again, by Tess Gerritsen
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” At the risk of overstating things, All the Light We Cannot See is far and away the most sumptuous, beautiful, and heartfelt book I’ve read in a great while. This is a book to get swept away in. Werner Pfennig is … More Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
“We are part of a long tradition of suffering.” Books about war–and particularly short story collections about war–always suffer in my mind because they inevitably get compared to what I believe is the greatest war collection of all time: The Things They Carried. It is to Phil Klay’s enormous credit that much of Redeployment stands ground with … More Book Review: Redeployment, by Phil Klay
Hanya Yanagihara is truly a literary talent to watch for. The People in the Trees, her debut novel, is a disquieting, affecting, gorgeously written tale sprawling in both scope and ambition. In it, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist by the name of Norton Perina is accused of pedophilia and sexual abuse among the forty children he adopted … More Book Review: The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara
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