As I’ve mentioned before, I love Christopher Moore for his ability to make me forget the troubles of the world. If he has to do that by making me laugh at the most sophomoric humor imaginable, so be it. With Serpent of Venice, though, Moore surpasses this admittedly low bar by adding two other components that I dearly love: Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe. At a book signing I attended, Moore explained that he got the idea for setting a monster story in Venice while […]
How to Make an Interesting Topic Unbearable
The headquarters of the Vidocq Society were housed in a Victorian brownstone in Philadelphia. I know this because author Michael Capuzzo reminds the reader at least four times throughout the 426 pages of The Murder Room, so he must think it’s pretty significant. This is a minor complaint about a book that is rife with problems. I picked this book up with high hopes, drawn in by what I think is a fascinating subject. The Murder Room is a work of non-fiction about a real-life […]
A Study of Grief You Need to Experience
“Wow.” That was me when my husband, seeing me turn the last page of Levels of Life and close the book, asked me “How was it?” I didn’t elaborate very much except to say, “You really need to read this,” with the added disclaimer, “but you might find it distressing.” How to describe Levels of Life? The book is divided into three parts: essentially, three essays that spin from the book’s premise, “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And […]
The Invention of Sensationalism
“What class the murder was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest,” writes Judith Flanders. She’s referencing Victorian England, but she may as well be talking about the U.S. in the twenty-first century (and England and many other places, no doubt). A full century before the term “missing white woman syndrome” was coined, so much about justice in Victorian England resonates with frightening similarity to our own time and place. First […]
Ghost Bride Proves to Be a Promising First Novel
“One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride,” begins Angsze Choo’s captivating novel about Li Lan, a young Chinese woman with few marital prospects in nineteenth century British Malaya. What follows is a mixture of romance, a coming-of-age story, a tale of the supernatural, and a love letter to Chinese tradition and afterlife. Li Lan comes from a respectable but bankrupt family. Her mother having died of smallpox years earlier, her father has become an opium addict […]
J. Maarten Troost’s Latest Travelogue: Enjoyed the Wit, Wished for More Substance
I became a fan of J. Maarten Troost when I read The Sex Lives of Cannibals, his 2004 travelogue that describes the time he spent on the little-known (to most Americans, at least) South Pacific nation of Kirabati. The author’s style is amusing and self-deprecating, and he has some worthwhile commentary on politics and the attitudes of the Western world. Nine years later, Mr. Troost published Headhunters on My Doorstep, and while I still enjoy his writing style, the book sadly lacks substance. J. Maarten […]