Initially, I thought: how could a book about a man confined to a hotel for life have enough plot or character development for 450 pages? Yet this turned out to…
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Leave the World Behind
April 19, 2021I took this novel’s advice and left my world behind one recent weekend. My family and I enjoyed a long weekend at a friend’s beach house. The long drive there…
Books I Did Not Finish
September 5, 2020For the Summer 2020 edition of Things I Started and Stopped, I’ve got three books. First up is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. When this book first came out…
Last Bus to Woodstock
August 18, 2020[spoiler alert!] A little surprising, a little disappointing. We’re fans of the British TV series, here, so I thought I’d better see how Colin Dexter originally depicted Inspector Morse and…
The Great Believers
August 16, 2020Ambitious novel set in two different time periods–1980s Chicago during the AIDS crisis and 2015 in Paris–with characters, timelines and plots that converged, but sometimes in confusing ways. The novel…
So You Want to Talk About Race
July 6, 2020Like many well-meaning and awkward white people who want to be better allies in anti-racism, several of my colleagues and I have formed a reading group to do some self-educating.…
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
May 26, 2020This did not disappoint. Although I was surprised at the similarities between this plot and its resolution and that of Sayers’s first novel Whose Body? I suspect that once you’ve…
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
May 19, 2020Absolutely eye-opening indictment of the ways that mainstream white feminism has failed women of color, their children, and larger communities. Anyone who considers themself a feminist should read this.
Strong Poison
May 13, 2020The most surprising thing happens on page 47 of this edition: Lord Peter proposes marriage to Harriet Vane who’s in prison for poisoning her former lover. This is just after…
The Turn of the Key
April 20, 2020In the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, this new novel by Ruth Ware seeks to revise and update Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw…