What a breathtaking novel. Enormous in every possible way, and yet somehow totally personal and relatable. I devoured “Alif the Unseen,” and I wish I were still reading it. On its surface, “Alif the Unseen” is the story of a young man, a hacker in a present day un-named police state in the Persian Gulf. He has girl troubles and so he codes a pretty little program to hide his digital presence from his ex-girlfriend, and in doing so taps into the world of jinn […]
Tell me something I haven’t imagined before
I’m having very mixed feelings about “Station Eleven.” It sure checks a lot of boxes for me including post-apocalyptic survival, a plague, interconnected characters, graceful exposition, and a creepy antagonist. But it misses the mark on originality and heart. Hard to summarize, and it skips back and forward in time a lot (effortlessly, to its credit), this is the story of a handful of individuals affected by a civilization-ending strain of the swine flu. These people are all connected through their various relationships with a […]
Guilty, no pleasure
It was an accident that I started reading “The Salaryman’s Wife” and ultimately not a happy one. My Goodreads queue includes a book called “The Pearl Diver,” and I searched for it on my library’s website to borrow digitally. What came up was the 8th book in a mystery series and without looking at the author’s name, I thought “damnit, my bad, better start at the beginning…” Damnit, my bad, indeed. This whole thing was such a monumental waste of time. The tropes are tedious. […]
Long Time Listener, First Time Reader
As a loyal listener of “This American Life,” I’ve been listening to stories from David Sedaris for ages. I rarely find him shocking (do people find him shocking?), but actually, hilarious and delightful. I would go so far as to say that I find him to be a comfort, and a familiar. This is the first of his books that I’ve actually listened to with my eyes. His voice is immediate and steadily present for me, in the best possible way. A series of stories […]
Definitely makes you feel like you bought this at the airport… in the best possible way
Try to relax, but you’ll just keep leaning in to get closer, more of this, faster. “Spiral” is a delivery system of everything fun and exciting about pop fiction. It’s a thriller with an old-school villain, a terrifying bio-weapon, wildly-believable pseudo-science, meticulously revised history, and a kickass prose-style. I loved this. That’s not to say there’s anything revelatory about it… it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it certainly paints it differently than any of the other wheels rolling around out there, and I’ll buy that […]
In which I am outraged by a book’s audacity to be poorly written, edited, and titled
This book made me unreasonably angry, so here I am, entering the world of the Cannonball Read as an outraged reader. I really wanted to love this book, because it’s about something about which I know nothing. But I wasn’t able to learn much. The narrative is completely scattered, and there are an astonishing number of tangents that are distracting and irritating. I mean, total non-sequitors. An example, “The story [of a prank pulled by Filippo Brunelleschi], known as “The Tale of the Fat Carpenter,” […]
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