I first heard about Thy Neighbor’s Wife when watching Netflix’s Voyeur, a documentary about author Gay Talese and a man who’d bought a motel solely so he could peep on the activities of those renting rooms. I found Voyeur fascinating, and so when I came across this on offer, I thought I’d give it a go. Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a big, fat book, delving into the sexual mores of the American public, and the efforts of lawmakers to govern these, from the mid-twentieth century […]
It’s about ethics in zombie journalism!
Zombies! So, I don’t have much luck with zombies. Stephen King’s Cell was pretty good, and Max Brooks’s zombie books are golden, but everything else is…..well, not worth talking about. Two things prompted me to give this one a go: I will always give zombies a go, because I always want those stories to be good (even though they rarely are), and Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire, a fairly well-liked author in these parts whom I’ve never read. But I came away […]
Investigative essays on various topics. Most of them were great.
The Devil & Sherlock Holmes is a collection of David Grann’s investigative journalism, covering a wide range of topics (though, as the subtitle of this book suggests, he is a bit fixated on stories of murder, madness and obsession, particularly the latter). David Grann is very good at what he does, and this collection is proof of that. All the essays in this book have been previously published in newspapers and magazines, including the two essays that gave the inspiration for the mashed-up title (“Mysterious […]
Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend
I didn’t think this book would be so emotionally difficult to get through. As readers of someone else’s fiction, it’s difficult to remember that there’s a real, down-to-earth, eats-and-breathes human behind the characters and fake world we so fall in love with. Terry Pratchett is himself, and even though Discworld was born from his head like Athena from Zeus, he’s not Discworld or any of the characters in it. In fact, to read his nonfiction is to sit in a very earthly room beside him […]
If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
The Dangers of Biographical Non-fiction
This was an excellent book that is part journalistic inquiry, part court-room drama, and part social discourse. Janet Malcolm is an experienced journalist who receives a mysterious letter from a lawyer suggesting that a libel court case may ruin the entire professional sphere of journalism. Malcolm takes the bait and begins investigating the already exhaustively investigated murder trial of a Dr. Jeff MacDonald and his follow up libel case with his court-biographer, Joseph McGrinnis. Throughout her book, Malcolm chronicles how Dr. MacDonald came to be […]
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