October, what a month. So much chaos in the world and the U.S. and none of it is positive. For your sakes, I’ll stick with books here. Suffice it to say, all the madness in the world in the last two weeks of the month left me with the attention span of a gnat so I have fewer low rated books and more I didn’t finish. But even with that, there were some real standouts this ... Read More...
August Reading Wrap-Up
August has followed summer out the door, but the weather was as lovely as the majority of my reading, with more highs than lows. The first week of September is about to end so I thought I ought to check in with what worked and what didn’t before I head into all the new fall releases. The Postcard is historical fiction based on a real family history that encompasses ... Read More...
October Reading Wrap-Up
Goodbye, October! This was another one of those months where, when I looked up it was the 20th and I had no idea where the days went. Is that an age thing? Because I never used to notice it so much. Anyway, I didn’t read as many books in October, for two reasons. One, I’m continuing to pay less attention to new releases (which is kind of working, in part because I’m only ... Read More...
Shelter in Place
Alexander Maksik doesn’t waste any time getting to the meat of his new novel Shelter in Place. The first chapter is a small paragraph introducing Joe March with three facts: his mother beat a man to death with a hammer, he fell in love with a woman named Tess and he battles a black weight that fills him, sometimes taking the shape of a large bird. Joe also lets us ... Read More...
The Golden Age: A Novel
Joan London’s The Golden Age is a quiet novel about a frightening time in the 1950s when, instead of fun and freedom, summer came to mean fear and isolation as pools were closed and children kept inside the house in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded polio. The Golden Age is a convalescent home in Australia where children who have been stricken with the disease are sent ... Read More...
Sergio Y.
Armando is a seventy-year-old highly esteemed psychiatrist in São Paulo and the narrator of Sergio Y. He is writing because of a patient he had many years ago—a seventeen-year-old boy who came to see him for several months but abruptly ended their sessions without explanation after returning from vacation in New York City. The boy’s name is Sergio and through a chance ... Read More...
