Category Archives: Book and film reviews

I enjoyed Dark Sonnet by Tom McCarthy and Bill Dohar, a historical mystery (if you need a genre). Murder, a hidden chalice, slypes, and bigotry both old and new, figure prominently. There are word puzzles, and Gerard Manley Hopkins is … Continue reading →

Beautiful translation by Susan Bernofsky. High literary drama. Short novel that traces the lives on people in a lakeside house in Germany, before and after WWII and East Germany. Deeply serious.Yet compelling and readable. Her counterpoint between the lives of … Continue reading →

I think I originally read this when I was about 15 years old. It cast a long shadow. Re-reading it…. boy is it a slog, and a not very good novel. But the bravura of Delaney’s science fiction is pretty … Continue reading →

I enjoyed reading Frederick Pohl’s sci-fi novel, Gateway, partly because it is so dated. The women are all referred to as “girls,” etc. Lots of 1970s psychoanalytic talk. And yet, the conceit is quite good: a sci-fi book about that … Continue reading →

I had forgotten how compelling and clear the prose was for Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a great writer. I love the occasional science and statistics asides. The explicitness of Holmes’ cocaine usage (7%) is also still shocking. The Sign of … Continue reading →

I do not read much non-fiction outside of material relating to Burkina Faso and West Africa. A friend recommended this book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, and it did … Continue reading →

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles is a verse novelette, written in Orkney dialect (to this American reader, it sounded in my head like very heavily-accented Scottish) and thus hard to read for a non-Orkney speaker, but the novelette … Continue reading →

Wyandotté by James Fenimore Cooper was published in 1843. I cannot recall how I stumbled on it. I read about 2/3 and then skimmed the rest. For a modern reader, the narrative techniques are a bit fusty. But from the … Continue reading →

Light, compelling, and deep at same time, Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower explores, cleverly, political strategies of gods and humans as they make their way through complex social world (that will eventually provoke you to think, wait a second… I … Continue reading →

I read very little ultra-contemporary fiction, but this was a gift. I started with some trepidation, but a personal connection to the Cardiff Jewish community (part of my extended family ended up in Wales in the 1880s) kept me going, … Continue reading →

Got this last week, and immediately devoured it in two nights. Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel is a clever, minimal sci-fi novel. it leverages the same characters as The Glass Hotel (I was glad I had read … Continue reading →

Somehow I stumbled across a reference to No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai so I ordered it from the library. Interesting novel from 1948 Japan. The narrator has lost interest in humans, but still must make his way through the … Continue reading →

Not exactly sure why, but “Annunciation” by Lauren Groff in the February 2022 The New Yorker may be currently up there as my most-appreciated short story in a couple years. The story is ultra-real, but the reader is simultaneously aware … Continue reading →

I have been catching up on reading short stories in The New Yorker, one of my favorite past-times. Cynthia Ozick’s story, “The Biographer’s Hat,” is a Broolyn-esque Singer-esque story about lonely lives in the urban penumbra. An interesting window into … Continue reading →

If you are interested in a nice book-length but very readable anecdotal explainer of where we humans are in 2022 in terms of applying genomics to medicine, this is the book for you. Ashley effectively communicates the amazing advances in … Continue reading →

A short, lyrical novel, about an enchanted night. My kids remember him as the clever narrator of his The New Yorker story, “The Maker of Miniatures.” This is, likewise, a miniature, full of feeling for the warm summer nights of … Continue reading →

I had read this decades ago, and largely forgotten how interesting the narrator’s voice is, and how refreshing is the style. Worth a re-read if it has been awhile.

The New Yorker seems back to form, after what seemed like (to me) a string of stories I was not that keen on. I really liked “The Ukraine” by Artem Chapeye (it just gives a feeling of warmth and love, … Continue reading →

I am a big fan of science fiction short story anthologies. But this edition, The year’s best science fiction, 2018, edited by Gardner Dozois, proved disappointing. I did not read all of the stories (almost 670 pages), but started with … Continue reading →

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut starts as the best Wikipedia entry you ever read, circling and linking, and as a reader you are compelled to just keep going. Then abruptly the pace slows, because the … Continue reading →