This novel was picked for the first-year program’s common read at my university. So of course I also imposed this as a common read pick for the three-family beach-house week…
Contemporary U.S. Literature
The Mothers
March 14, 2018This was one of the best novels I’ve read in a very long time. I thought it would be about women struggling with infertility (provenance of mistaken belief: a half-listened…
Camino Island
February 17, 2018Camino Island, by John Grisham, definitely felt like a guilty pleasure. I listened to it, for the neighborhood book club, while driving around town for a few weeks. It’s the…
All the Missing Girls
October 27, 2017Another pick from the neighborhood book club. Like Gone Girl but with the innovation of narrating the story backwards. So you get the protagonist, an unsympathetically drawn woman from a small…
The Giver
September 21, 2017Rather depressing story about what we might give up if we wanted a perfect world of “Sameness”: colors, music, real feelings, holidays, family bonds. Don’t get attached to the kid…
The Whole Town’s Talking
August 23, 2017This has to be the whitest book I’ve ever read. Flagg’s newest (?) novel chronicles the evolution of Elmwood Springs, MO, from it’s origins as a Swedish immigrant farming settlement…
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
August 1, 2017At first I was enchanted with this novel, but then I decided it’s bloated. Pessl is definitely a talented writer, and the novel eventually finds a plot, but it took…
State of Wonder
July 26, 2017I always swear that I’ll never teach Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ever again, because I can’t face the thought of any more partially plagiarized essays about the symbolism of…
Above Us Only Sky
May 18, 2017This is the excerpt for a placeholder post.