It’s clear to me after reading this umpteenth suspense stand alone by Harlan Coben that the man can write a thriller in his sleep (and perhaps does?). They go down easy—all too easy—like a big bag of chips. It took me less than 24 hours to finish this one, but I worry in another 24 hours, I will have forgotten the plot and in another 24, the main character, and a few weeks later, I will have to remind myself that I actually did read […]
It’s Not You, It’s Me
I came to this novel with a lot of good will from previous Sarah Waters’ novels—in particular The Night Watch, Fingersmith, and Tipping the Velvet. Waters is interested in how the “love that dare not speak its name” actually speaks its name quite loudly in the past—whether it’s during World War II, the 1890s or the 1860s. Her characters, often at the fringes of society, fall in love, double-cross each other, and challenge the norms of the worlds they live in, in all sorts of […]
The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages)
What do the following have in common: An inexperienced girls basketball team coached by a software developer originally from Mumbai, a cancer researcher with a Dickens-like childhood of loss and neglect who goes on to develop the most effective treatment for childhood leukemia, a Civil Rights activist/strategist who worked with Martin Luther King in Birmingham, and a small mountain village in France that stood up to the Nazi occupation. These are just some of the many stories that Malcolm Gladwell relates to the famous story […]
The Book Kicks the Movie’s Ass (or the winner of the Hillenbrand/Jolie death match is . . . )
I fell in love with Louis Zamperini when I saw a Sunday Morning piece on him back when Laura Hillenbrand’s book first came out. Not surprisingly, I found the best part of Angelina Jolie’s film adaptation was the end scene—showing a clip of the real “Louie” running through the streets of Tokyo with the Olympic Torch—a feat amazing both because of his age (80-something) and because of what he had gone through at the hands of the Japanese. I found the movie frustrating because I […]
Baby, Don’t Fear the Reaper
When I first read the review for this book in Entertainment Weekly, I thought to myself, “Do I really want to read another post-apocalyptic novel?” Over the last several years, I’ve experienced the world ending by plague, zombies, some sort of electronic pulse, and an alien invasion or two. Though my initial response was, “Maybe not,” I’m glad that I picked this book off the bestseller shelf at my local library. It IS a novel about the end of the world as we know it, […]
The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton
I have to preface this review by saying that I’m a big fan of The Mountain Goats and John Darnielle’s lyrics in particular. A few years ago, I got a hold of a copy of All Hail West Texas after one of my guitar teachers at Old Town School used “The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton” for a twin spin (a sheet of paper with a song on each side). The CD was on heavy rotation in my car for months—I sang […]
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