At first I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver because I’m not a huge fan of chick lit. The book starts out sounding much like the relationship drama books I tend to avoid; however, I kept with it because I was intrigued by the structure and premise [...]
Book Review
Inspired by Care’s Quick Mini-Reviews to Finish 2008, I’m going to just do some short comments on the last few books I feel like reviewing for 2008. I’m skipping a few books, mostly because I didn’t have strong feelings about them, but this list covers the ones I have something to say about. Friday Night [...]
The last book I finished in 2008 was Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger. I had this book on my radar even before I read A Prayer for the City, because I have a soft spot in my heart for inspirational sports stories. Even though the book turned out to be different than I expected, [...]
If there is one genre I have gotten sucked into this year, it’s comic books. I started with Watchmen, then moved on to Fables, adding Blankets and Persepolis for good measure. When I came across The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, a fictional novel set during the Golden Age of Comics, [...]
When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is the story of both a family and a place, an ambitious undertaking for any book. For the most part, author Peter Godwin successfully balances these two complementary stories, resulting in a book that balances between a personal memoir and a well-reported look at the destruction of a country. [...]
When I think about books, there are usually two qualities I think about — the strength of the story and the strength of the writing. In most cases, both qualities are good or both qualities are bad. This wasn’t the case for In the Land of Invisible Women, a memoir by Dr. Quanta A. Ahmed. [...]
Mark Dunn’s epistolary allegory Ella Minnow Pea takes place on the fictional island of Nollop, just off the coast of South Carolina. The island was named after Nevin Nollop, the man credited with coming up with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” When letters start to fall off the Nollop [...]
I have to admit, I wouldn’t have picked up The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson if it wasn’t one of the required books for my literary journalism class because the topic — lobsters and the people that love them — isn’t something I would normally read about. But Corson’s book is so good [...]
Books by Joyce Carol Oates are the epitome of my idea of sophisticated dorkiness. You don’t feel bad reading Oates because she seems literary and sophisticated (which she is). However, the plot of each book could be straight out of one of the Lifetime movies I sometimes watch and then feel embarrassed that I got [...]
I’ve been reading the Fables series by Bill Willingham for a couple months now. The problem I have when I try to review an issue of Fables is that it’s a series. You don’t read the volumes individually; each comic builds on the stories of the previous volume and although you could go through reviews and [...]
