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Dark Fiction: The Line That Held Us

December 5, 2018

line

  I hadn’t planned on a week of reviews about dark (or difficult) fiction, but realized that’s where my reading had gone after finishing David Joy’s The Line That Held Us. It’s the story of Darl Moody, who while poaching on a neighbor’s land, shoots and kills another man. The man he kills is the brother of Dwayne Brewer, a behemoth of a man, known for violence and ... Read More...

9 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Putnam, Southern life

Dark Fiction: Waiting for Eden

December 3, 2018

waiting

  Much of Elliot Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden takes place in a hospital room. A room where Eden Malcolm has been in a coma for three years. He was a young man so full of life that He treated the whole world, too, like it was a series of cliffs that existed for no other reason than for him to jump off. But now his body below his torso is gone, lost to an IED in Iraq, ... Read More...

13 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Iraq, Knopf, literary, marriage, war

November Reading Wrap-Up

November 30, 2018

november

Well, my November this year was not as much of a blockbuster as last year, but I did read four outstanding books, out of a total of 12 for the month. Not too surprisingly, they were all books released several years ago. Generally, November is a slow time for new releases (which seems odd to me because it’s right in time for holiday sales). This means most of my reading for the ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Feature Tagged: historical fiction, mini-reviews, mystery, WWII

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

November 28, 2018

kingdom

Last Thursday one of the things I gave thanks for was the opportunity to head back to Three Pines and visit all its wonderful inhabitants in Louise Penny’s latest novel, Kingdom of the Blind. It’s the 14th book in her Chief Inspector Gamache series and finds Gamache suspended from the Sûreté. He’s being investigated for, among other things, letting the largest ever shipment of ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Minotaur Books, mystery

When God Was a Rabbit

November 26, 2018

god

One of the best gifts of reading is not only discovering a new writer you love, but learning that they have written previous books, opening up the possibility of more wonderful reading. This was the case with Sarah Winman. I read her novel, Tin Man, and it was exactly the kind of simple but poetic prose that draws me in. So, when I saw it was her second novel I knew I wanted to ... Read More...

10 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Bloomsbury, childhood, debut, England, family, literary

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

November 23, 2018

pale

  I didn’t finish The Pale King. I tried. I really tried, but it is like a 400-level college English class—for majors only. And it's almost 600 pages. The fact that it’s ostensibly about the IRS doesn’t help because if nothing else David Foster Wallace was a stickler for accuracy and cites copious amounts of tax code at a level that seems designed to make your eyes bleed. ... Read More...

7 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, literary, Little Brown and Company

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