Category: Reading
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Favorite reads of 2017
At the end of each year, I round up my favorite five reads of the year–although not all of them were necessarily published this year. This year overall was a good year for reading. I discovered the Nocturnal Readers’ box, a monthly mystery box of horror and dark fiction, which although it contained some real…
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Halloween Reading
Autumn is my favorite time of year. The crisp weather, the leaves turning, the light getting slantier–this is the perfect time to settle in with a spooky story, which happens to be my favorite kind of story. And even though Halloween is tomorrow, it’s not too late to get your spook on. Here are few…
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Recommended Reading: Borne
A fable disguised as a dystopia, Borne by Jeff VanderMeer is set in a ruined City on an unnamed Earth, where Rachel scavenges for supplies to give her lover, Wick, who makes biotech to sell to other survivors. The City is ruled by a gigantic bear, Mord, a bio-engineered relic of the once-powerful Company, and a woman known…
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Recommended Reading from the Rooster’s Summer Reading Challenge
I recently posted about the Summer Reading Challenge, a mini Tournament of Books. I discovered two great new reads via this challenge. Marlena by Julie Buntin is a coming-of-age story with such a genuine narrative voice and such well-delineated characters that it takes on all the appearance of truth. After her parents’ divorce, Cat moves with her brother…
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In praise of short books…
Lately, I’ve very much been appreciating the short book. In fact, I have tentatively come to the conclusion that a novel’s perfect length is between 250 and 350 pages. It’s not that I don’t love big, fat, epic novels. In fact, I count several of them among my favorite reads: Lonesome Dove; The Passage trilogy; Anathem; The Stand and It. Perhaps…
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Friday reads: Foxlowe and The Girls
I discovered Foxlowe by Eleanor Wasserberg and The Girls by Emma Cline because both were short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year (which is one of my favorite award lists–always something good to read on that shortlist). I read them back to back and was struck by how similar, and different, they were from each other. Both are about young…
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Recommended reading: Universal Harvester
If you are of a certain age, you likely remember the video store as a regular stop on the errands run. And if you grew up in a small American town, you may remember the locally owned video store as a peculiar confluence of people and culture in a place where there wasn’t a whole…
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Recommended Reading: Ill Will
“Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination — that, in fact, we were only peeping through…
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Recommended Reading: Underground Airlines
I highly enjoyed and appreciated Ben H. Winters’s gripping new novel, Underground Airlines, on three levels. First, it presents a fascinating what-if scenario. In this alternate America, instead of having a civil war, the states came to a compromise that essentially made slavery constitutional into perpetuity. In the present day, slavery continues to be legal in…
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Recommended Reading: Crooked Heart
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans — Ten-year-old Noel Bostock is an odd boy, smart, a reader, independent. He lives with his godmother until she goes senile and then dies. Left bereft, Noel is evacuated with other London children at the start of the Blitz, when Vee takes him in on impulse. Vee lives hand-to-mouth, always with some…
Shannon Turlington 