being not doing

This is another book I’ve had for years and just now got around to reading. Prodigal Summer is a lovely novel, one of my favorites by Barbara Kingsolver. Before this book, the only novel of hers I really loved was The Poisonwood Bible; for me, that novel was in a different league than […]

As I roll into the last quarter of the year, I’m pausing to take stock of how well I’m doing on my own personal book-related challenges.
As expected, I have had no trouble actually reading, but a bit less success powering through some of the denser works that have been sitting by the side of my […]

I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and found the balance of humor and pathos just right. Maybe it takes the voice of a young narrator to really convey the hilarity and heartache of childhood, or maybe it’s the more direct relationship to Alexie’s personal biography, but it moved me in […]

I hated this book. I know that it’s super popular and everyone has raved about how Khaled Hosseini is a rising star, and The Kite Runner is an ingenious and personalized look at the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, I wanted to throw it across the room every few pages. […]

This book I did very much enjoy. I purchased it after reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and was looking forward to another novel where I could give myself over to the writing free of expectations. Although it sat on my shelf for some time before I got to it, Kafka On the Shore […]

Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey, is the latest novel in a series that I’ve been reading for a few years now. With each new volume, the books have declined, which is a shame because the first, Kushiel’s Dart is engaging and clever and compellingly well-told. The plot, however, is quite involved, and this […]

I wasn’t aware of it until I read Anil’s Ghost, but I have been waiting years for Michael Ondaatje to write another novel. The book is lovely, one where you are somewhat in thrall to the prose once you begin. It’s been long enough since I read The English Patient that I have […]

Something Rotten is only the second book I’ve read by Jasper Fforde. The other was The Big Over Easy, which I liked quite a bit (it was one that I picked up from the ‘3 for the price of 2′ table, where I can invariably find two books that I’ve been wanting to get […]

I had been interested in reading Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau, for some time when it showed up as a donation to the bookstore where I was volunteering. Education per se is not where my sociological interests lie, but Lareau’s study promised to be more than just another study about how the public education […]

I had no idea what to expect from Cloud Atlas before I started reading it, and that’s the way I recommend experiencing the book. It’s a novel with striking similarities to Never Let Me Go, one of which is the pleasure of letting it unfold as it will, with no knowledge going into the […]