Tag: fiction
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Review: Kostova’s The Historian
Ed note: This review was originally written in 2007 for a now long defunct livejournal account. The Historian Elizabeth Kostova A retelling of the Dracula story, this time by a pretentious writer looking to hit it big with a “literary thriller”. Generally, this is the kind of book I cannot resist. I love nothing more…
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Review: Fasman’s the Geographer’s Library
The Geographer’s Library Jon Fassman This is the kind of popular novel I generally like, a “literary page turner” that in the old days would have been compared to In the Name of the Rose but which is now compared to the Da vinci Code. Its plot driven, but with intellectual pretenses and is right…
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Review: Mosley’s Long Fall
The Long Fall Walter Mosley Crime novels are very grounded in place. George Pelacanos’s novels sing of DC; Laura Lippman’s of Baltimore of Los Angeles, and until recently, Walter Mosley’s most famous crime novels were set in Watts. For the last decade of so the heavy hitters of crime fiction have mostly been avoiding New…
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The Books I Read in 2012
Attention conservation notice: this post is long and has nothing to do with working out. I have kept a list of every book I have read I have read since I was thirteen years old. Yeah, obsessive record keeping didn’t start with my running log. Below is a list of every book I read this…
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Schmahmann’s The Double Life of Alfred Buber
The Double Life of Alfred Buber I received this as a review copy from the Permanent Press, an excellent independent publisher based in New York. The Permanent Press is one of only a few literary independent publishers left who take the chance to publish serious novels by little known writers. I admire that. And I…
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Review: Cronin’s The Passage
The Passage: A Novel (Book One of The Passage Trilogy) Justin Cronin The Passage is a seven hundred page vampire novel written by a novelist who graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop. That makes it a pretty rare bird. It is also a book I enjoyed tremendously. I imagine there is very little middle ground…
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Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand
The Cold Six Thousand is the second volume of Ellroy’s “Underworld Trilogy” tracing the history of 1960s America through the lives of real and imagined gangsters. Written in an intense staccato style, the books are filled with conspiracies, bad men behaving horribly, and real and imagined dirt on most of the pivotal figures of the…
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Crime in the City – Mosley’s the Long Fall
The Long Fall Walter Mosley Crime novels are very grounded in place. George Pelacanos’s novels sing of DC; Laura Lippman’s of Baltimore of Los Angeles, and until recently, Walter Mosley’s most famous crime novels were set in Watts. For the last decade of so the heavy hitters of crime fiction have mostly been avoiding New…
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Review: McAuley’s Quiet War
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley Fans of science fiction often try to place works in the genre into one or more subcategories. It is “space opera” or it is “cyberpunk”; it is “steam punk” or it is “military SF”. It is “Hard SF” or “New Wave”. These distinctions can be helpful to the reader picking…
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Review: The Quiet War
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley Fans of science fiction often try to place works in the genre into one or more subcategories. It is “space opera” or it is “cyberpunk”; it is “steam punk” or it is “military SF”. It is “Hard SF” or “New Wave”. These distinctions can be helpful to the reader picking…
Milo and the Calf 