Dope by Sara Gran
Dope is such a solid crime novel that it makes me want to immediately clear my TBR pile and read Sara Gran’s entire catalogue. The problem with that is I’ve tried to read Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead so many times and have never been able to get into it. I just can’t connect with the inner monologue of the titular character. Which sucks because it’s doubtless that Sara Gran is a talented writer. I picked this one up when I saw it on a […]
The Churchgoer by Patrick Coleman
It’s clear that Patrick Coleman has an axe to grind against evangelical culture. He uses The Churchgoer as an outlet to do so. I’m a Christian and while I’ve always been a mainline Protestant one (translation: a tad more open-minded than many), I’m quite familiar with the evangelical culture Coleman is skewering here. Many of his references and stories brought back flashbacks to my own life. Attendance numbers have steadily declined in these churches for the last decade (reflective of a decline in church attendance amongst all […]
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
Disclaimer: This is not an impartial review. The author Casey Cep and I attended grad school for a year. Though we’ve lost touch, I consider her an old friend and think highly of her. Harper Lee is an iconic American figure almost as much for her reclusiveness as her writing. Aside from a smattering of journal articles, her one hit wonder To Kill A Mockingbird is probably the most printed book in history outside of the Bible, yet she never wrote anything else and maintained a veiled […]
Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott
Karen Abbott is one of those writers I’ve always meant to get around to reading. She writes about fun pop-history stuff like the Chicago underworld at the turn of the 20th century and female spies who operated during the Civil War. It makes sense she would turn her scholarly attentions to notorious bootlegger George Remus and his wife Imogene. I would argue that while Al Capone is likely the most famous figure to emerge from prohibition, George Remus has the more interesting story. A […]
Fire Will Freeze by Margaret Millar
Agatha Christie is considered the godmother of the cozy mystery, even though her books are tonally different than the cozies of today. If you’re not familiar with the cozy mystery: quaint country side, quirky-but-endearing characters, random corpse, a place where murder rarely happens. Nowadays, people dress up cozies with animals and recipes but when Christie was writing them, they had a tinge of the hardboiled in them. Not much; Christie will never be confused for Raymond Chandler. But just enough. I don’t know if Margaret […]
You Gotta Have WA by Robert Whiting
Growing up a big baseball fan, I always knew the sport was popular in Japan. I also always knew it was played differently but I didn’t know why. Not necessarily played differently rules-wise (though there is some of that, like ties for example), but culturally, there were different expectations of the players and the clubs. Robert Whiting smoothly lays the differences out in this book. I worry sometimes that westerners don’t always have a sensitivity to the nuanced differences in respective eastern cultures but he […]
