Fade, by Robert Cormier

Here’s the plot hook: at the age of thirteen, Paul Moreaux discovers that he can turn invisible. Here’s what would have happened in the hands of lesser writers: the invisible Paul would have stolen lots of stuff and watched girls undress and pulled harmless pranks. Here’s what happened in the hands of Robert Cormier: the [...]

Read Full Post »

Porn for Women, by the Cambridge Women’s Photography Collective

This book derives its humor from shameless heterosexist gender stereotypes. In deference to my feminist beliefs, I am going to weakly opine that no one should read this book. It perpetuates myths and drives wedges between the sexes. Okay, glad that part’s done. On to the review: This book is uproarious. There are four heroes, [...]

Read Full Post »

Transgressions, edited by Ed McBain

“Ah geeze,” I admitted to myself, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” I was supposed to be acquiring mysteries for the public library where I’d just started working– but I didn’t know which authors were good or popular or trendy or anything. Guess I missed that day in library school. Fortunately, Ed McBain came to [...]

Read Full Post »

Bone: Out from Boneville, by Jeff Smith

The Wizard of Oz could have been awfully boring. Dorothy could have traveled to Oz, seen some munchkins and a flying monkey or two, and skedaddled back home. It’s the sort of story that would have entertained young children, but only young children. And that’s what the Bone series is like, at first. Forced to [...]

Read Full Post »

Booked to Die, by John Dunning

From the onset, we suspect that Cliff Janeway is a tough guy. It makes sense. People named Cliff aren’t pushovers. Janeway is a cop, a fact which supports our tough-guy hypothesis… except that he’s suddenly no longer a cop, because he’s been kicked off the force for beating up a suspect, a fact which pretty [...]

Read Full Post »

City of Thieves, by David Benioff

As City of Thieves opens, an American screenwriter is paid to write an autobiographical essay. He can’t find anything of interest in his immediate background, but he has always suspected that his Floridian grandparents have more to tell about their experiences in Leningrad during WWII. When he asks them, they’re finally ready to tell. So [...]

Read Full Post »

Lankhmar: Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber

This is a re-issue (minus one story) of a collection of novellas and stories that were written in 1962 and 1970 as prequels to SFWA Grandmaster Fritz Leiber’s popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Confused? Trying to track the history of these stories, I am too. But never mind all that. Forget that this [...]

Read Full Post »

Touch Me, I’m Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You’ve Ever Heard, by Tom Reynolds

Have you listened closely to the words of your favorite love song? Listen again… “Every Breath You Take,” that rock classic by The Police is among the top 10 songs played at weddings and funerals. Whoops! It’s about Sting’s bitter reaction to the end of his first marriage, and if you listen closely, it sounds [...]

Read Full Post »

Already Dead, by Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston is not the first writer to blend vampires into crime fiction, but he may be the wisest in how he melds the two genres. Casting a vampire as detective in the hard-boiled noir tradition makes a surprising amount of sense. Let’s consider how the two traditions overlap: A hard-boiled detective keeps late hours [...]

Read Full Post »

A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute

Australia has come up several times in recent reviews here on Blogging for a Good Book and it’s got me thinking about the land Down Under in fiction and on film. I loved Tim Winton’s Breath, a coming-of-age story about Australian surf culture in the 1970s. Peter Carey is another great Aussie novelist: try The [...]

Read Full Post »

Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris

I fell in love with audiobooks about a year ago. They’re great to listen to while doing housework and driving to and from work. A month or two ago, I decided to give Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series a try, to see what it was I was missing. My husband loves these books, and I [...]

Read Full Post »

The Draining Lake, by Arnaldur Indriðason

The Draining Lake is the fourth Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson thriller/mystery. Like Jar City, Silence of the Grave, and Voices, the action takes place in Iceland. A scientist studying the mysterious draining of a lake near Reykjavik after an earthquake sees the bones of a skeleton uncovered. The body had been weighted down by a Russian [...]

Read Full Post »

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen

In my way of thinking, the way to experience a 250-mile trek across the Himalayas, up to 17,000 feet, is by getting under a warm blanket on my sofa and reading a book about it by one of the best nature writers alive. The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, is such a book. In 1973, [...]

Read Full Post »

Angels of Destruction, by Keith Donohue

On a very cold January night, in a small Pennsylvania town, a nine-year-old girl with glasses shows up on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn. Margaret is a lonely widow whose only daughter, Erica, ran away from home as a teenager ten years earlier in 1975 with her boyfriend Wiley and hasn’t been seen in town [...]

Read Full Post »

Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods, by Cary Griffith

I picked up this book because I wanted to get a quick look at how published writers write about being in the woods. I intended to skim just a few pages. From the first page, I was hooked. I finished the book in less than two days, not wanting to put it down to eat [...]

Read Full Post »

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

“Reports had surfaced of some customers discovering live eels in their drinking water, which suggested that the filters were not perhaps working optimally.” CSI: 1850. A deadly epidemic of cholera sweeps through a London neighborhood, claiming its victims in a pattern with a deadly epicenter: the Broad Street water pump. OK, it’s tough writing a [...]

Read Full Post »

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

It’s only his first day of high school, but Arnold “Junior” Spirit has had enough. His underfunded school is on the Spokane Indian reservation, where Junior’s whole family lives within five miles of where they were born. His mother would have been a teacher, his father would have been a musician, and his sister would [...]

Read Full Post »

The Forger’s Spell, by Edward Dolnick

From 1938-1945 the most famous and admired Vermeer in the world was a fake. This entertaining jaunt through the world of art forgery focuses on Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, who foisted seven fake Vermeers on a fawning audience of duped art critics, swindling millions out of American robber barons and infamous art collector Hermann [...]

Read Full Post »