Tag: recommended
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Review: Buekes’s Broken Monsters
Broken Monsters (Reading Group Guide) Lauren Buekes Super well-done mystery novel set turned super-natural what-the-fuck. Wonderful characters including sketchy wanna-be youtube stars, troubled ex-cons, teens in over their heads, overworked cops and mentally ill artists all face unknowable something or other in post-industrial Detroit. Good fun. I picked this up not knowing what to expect…
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Review: Hoffman’s Savage Harvest
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art Carl Hoffman A strange and fascinating book that uses the mystery of Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance in New Guinea to trace the author (and our societies) fraught relationship with indigenous peoples. Was Rockerfeller killed? Was he eaten? Did he kind of…
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Review: Swanson’s Manhunt
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (P.S.) James Swanson I am an American male who has reached middle age. This means I must read at least one civil war related book a year for the next twenty-five years. This year, I read this gripping account of Lincoln’s assassination, the flight of his killers, and…
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Review: Morrison’s God Help the Child
God Help the Child: A novel Toni Morrison A minor work by a major author, this slim book by one of the greatest American novelists is beautiful and haunting. It moves back and forth from the allegorical to the realistic tracing the story of Bride, a wounded child who grows into a celebrated, but wounded…
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Review: Price’s The Whites
The Whites: A Novel Richard Price Richard Price is the best crime writer working today. Perhaps that is because he isn’t really a crime writer. Price is a writer of the lives of ordinary, damaged people trying to make sense of a confused, violent, world. In his books, those people tend to be cops and…
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Review: Side’s Hellhound on His Trail
Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History Hampton Sides Hampton Side’s gripping, almost moment by moment, recounting of the events surrounding the assignation of Martin Luther King is a must read if the history of the civil rights movement, and the attempts to destroy it, mean anything to…
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Review: Norris’s Between You & Me
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen Mary Norris Grammar books generally come in two stripes – clever, and not very helpful and helpful, but not very clever. Between you and me is the book that proves the rule. It’s exceedingly clever (perhaps the best written book on writing well I’ve ever read)…
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Review: Mandel’s Station Eleven
Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel This is a wonderfully strange, somewhat SF, pretty dystopian, near future novel that’s also about the nature of love, what it means to be a family, and how to stay human, and creative, in a word stacked against you. I loved this book. Science fiction type books that deal…
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Review: French’s In the Woods
In the Woods Tana French The first of French’s Dublin Murder squad novels, this is the type of literary novel masquerading as a crime novel that I absolutely adore. On the surface, this is the story of an unsolved disappearance and an unsolved murder, decades apart. And on that level, it’s a very successful crime…
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Review: Steinhauer’s All the Old Knives
All the Old Knives: A Novel Olen Steinhauer Steinhauer is one of the best espionage writers working today. Maybe the best, actually. His books hit the sweet spot of fast-paced plotting with well-drawn characters and top-notch writing. This little book goes in a somewhat different direction from the action packed Tourist books. The concept is that…
Milo and the Calf 