I am often wary of Southern Gothic novels. I am a Southerner by birth, but often feel my southernness is buried deep in my psyche in a way that allows me to understand southern ways of thinking and doing, but I rarely think or do things that way myself. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin spoke eloquently to my inner Southerner and I enjoyed every minute of reading it. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter pretends to be a mystery story, but is really a story […]
The Italian police are just the worst.
I picked up The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi several times at my local used book store and the library before I actually bought it. The cover, which depicts a Renaissance sculpture, suggests that the “True Story” takes place at that time. In reality, the Monster of Florence murders occurred between 1968 and 1985, and were never solved. The scandalous killings of 16 people, each involved couples, murdered at local trysting spots amongst the hillsides around the city of Florence. Both […]
Start Here, Commit to Three More
I just finished The Shadow of the Wind after a full day of reading. Having already read the other two books in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series published so far, I had essentially worked backwards to finish with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s beginning story. At 487 pages it’s a long, glorious read, jam packed with plot, sub-plots and enough twists and turns to keep readers engrossed to the final page. The Shadow of the Wind introduces Daniel Sempere, the son of an antiquarian bookseller, growing […]
Job Hunting Is a Full-time Job and a Not Very Good One
I picked up Bait and Switch when my son was assigned Nickel and Dimed for a summer reading assignment. I wasn’t surprised by what Barbara Ehrenreich learned about white-collar unemployment in America, since I went through a stretch of long-term unemployment in 2011-2012. Even though this book was published way back in 2004, I think the costs, stresses and failures Ehrenreich encounters have only ramped up in intensity after 2009. As she did in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich dropped herself into the trenches and created […]
This was so bad. Like, so very, very bad. I can’t even describe how bad it was.
I’m not sure I can express how much I hated Beautiful You, but I’ll try. I normally take any Palahniuk story with a grain of salt and tongue firmly in cheek, but this was just a bridge too far. I hated all the characters, the entire premise wasn’t smart, funny, satirical or the least bit meta. Honestly, anyone who thinks this book is any of those things is a complete dolt. The really sad part is, I kept waiting for everything to turn around and […]
Women’s Rights From an Academic Perspective
I read From Outrage to Courage for an online course on International Women’s Health and Human Rights I took from Stanford University, which was led by the author, Anne Firth Murray. As a textbook, it was spot on in covering the main material of the course, as one would expect, but as a primer on women’s issues around the world, one could not ask for a better overview of the pressures, problems and political land mines that women face every day, around the world, from […]
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