Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi has a new novel, Son of Nobody and it’s safe to say his unique narrative style has not changed. Instead of a lone lifeboat adrift for 227 days, Son of Nobody takes place in two distinctly different settings, the Trojan War, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Despite being separated by distance and millennia this is essentially a story of ... Read More...
Such Kindness: A Novel
I’ve been craving pace in my reading lately so am surprised to be here with an introspective novel spanning only a few days and very little action. Set in present-day Massachusetts, Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III is a tender, painful look at one man’s reckoning of an expansive life that once included marriage, a son, and owning his own business, but is now diminished to ... Read More...
This Other Eden
In 1911 there was a small island off the coast of Maine comprised of a group of families who were the descendants of the island’s original 1792 settlers—an escaped slave, his Irish wife, and later, other refugees from society. The island is still there, but its inhabitants are long gone. Paul Harding’s novel, This Other Eden, is the elegiac recounting of their history, lives, ... Read More...
January Reading Wrap-Up
What a month! By and large January had mostly great reading, but there were some real misses. I reviewed the books I enjoyed so this recap is going to be a bit less upbeat with the books I didn’t love. One in particular is a heartbreaker. Either I read far too much or Reef Road was not the thriller for me because I can’t remember much about it at all. Set in Palm ... Read More...
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas opens with a charred corpse being found near a humanitarian aid compound that sits in a remote village on the border between north and South Sudan. The body’s discovery is the grim reminder that violent clashes between the government and rebels are increasing. This is the first in a series of events that upsets the fragile balance between the ... Read More...
My 8 Best Books of 2021
Best is a big word, especially these days when words that have been a part of the lexicon for lifetimes feel as if they’re losing their meaning. The first that comes to mind is “normal”. There is nothing normal about our weather, our politics, America. There’s a COVID vaccine and a booster, but the virus has remained a partisan issue. Which is to say I went to the ... Read More...
