When 13-year-old Patch sees a girl being abducted he acts without thinking and rushes the kidnapper. The girl escapes, but what follows changes Patch’s life and is the foundation for Chris Whitaker’s new novel All the Colors of the Dark. Patch and everyone he knows is changed by his heroic act in this opus saturated with the feeling of a writer who is leaving it all on the ... Read More...
November Reading Wrap-Up
Goodbye, November, hello, December! Did anyone else find November to be a rather placid month? It went a bit faster, but as I age I always think that. I just can’t remember anything extra good or bad that happened—which is great, right? My reading felt the same way as I bounced between thrillers and literary fiction. A lot of enjoyable reading, but very little that wowed ... Read More...
A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost
If you’re a fan of Saturday Night Live then you’ll know the name Colin Jost. If not, he’s one of the anchors for Weekend Update and a very funny man. His memoir is called A Very Punchable Face and listening to it with him narrating, had me driving around aimlessly so I didn’t have to stop. Beyond the funny is an unexpectedly interesting man. The title comes from the fact that ... Read More...
Recursion
Blake Crouch’s new novel, Recursion, has left me stumped. In order to review a book, I need to be able, to some degree, to understand it and in this case I’m not sure I do. It’s about time travel and its impact. Sort of. Maybe. I think… It’s 2007 and Helena Smith is a neuroscientist whose mother has Alzheimer’s. She has spent years trying to devise a way to capture and map ... Read More...
Summer Thrillers: Mini-Reviews
I haven't given much thought to seasonal reading, but this summer I've read more thrillers than I have in years' past. Maybe because they are more about plot and less about character and easier to digest? Who knows, but here are two summer releases I tore through. They're on opposite sides of the drama scale- one boils over right from the beginning while the other is more of a ... Read More...
June Reading Wrap-Up
Like a number of other bloggers I talked to, my reading fluctuated in June from really good to gave-up-on to meh. The good news is that I got to attend two great book events—Madeline Miller was here to discuss Circe (which is my favorite novel of the year so far) and Georgia Hunter gave a wonderful presentation about the facts behind her wonderful historical novel, We Were the ... Read More...
