What if you had broken the law and rather than being sent to prison you could opt into a program that would make you a better person? The upside is it’s not prison, you get to keep your job, you have no living expenses, and when you’re finished after six months you’ll be provided with a down payment on a new home and will be on your way to personal and profession success. The ... Read More...
Sourdough: A Novel by Robin Sloan
September has already been a month of heavy (literally) reading. Namely, Ken Follett’s latest, which clocked in at a daunting 928 pages. It is one of those times when I have loved having an e-book because I have a tendency to fall asleep in bed while reading and a book like that could have broken my nose. It’s not just literal, though, it’s been a month of heavy reading ... Read More...
The Answers: A Novel by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey’s new novel, The Answers appealed to me because of its premise: intimacy in the modern world of technology. At the novel’s center is Mary, a young woman, who used to be known as Junia, born in the Tennessee mountains to a father who believed the only way to truly worship God was to be removed from all that is manmade. This should be FULL. STOP. all Lacey ... Read More...
Back to Moscow
Having recently read and adored The Tsar of Love and Techno I wasn’t sure I needed another book about contemporary Russian life. Happily, I ignored myself and read Back to Moscow anyway. Guillermo Erades’ novel looks at the modern day Russian experience from the microcosm of a young man in Moscow. Martin is twenty-four and has arrived from Europe as a graduate student ... Read More...
The Sellout: A Novel
How do you review a book when you’re not quite certain that you should or even that you should have been allowed to read it? This was the question in my mind after finishing Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The novel is set in a ghetto outside Los Angeles called Dickens and is about a young black man whose childhood is spent being homeschooled and basically tortured by his father, a ... Read More...
A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
When I think of Michael Cunningham many things about his writing come to mind: poetic, compelling… so many adjectives, and yet funny is not among them. Not that he is dark or his writing is without joy, but until I read his newest book, a series of short stories called A Wild Swan, he’d never made me laugh out loud. Now he puts a modern spin on eleven fairy tales and does so in ... Read More...
