The List: Second Time’s the Charm

Some books are better the second time around. Plot details or character behaviors or Deep Thoughts that didn’t register the first time can sparkle during a second or third or fourth visit. Watership Down, by Richard Adams Animal Farm, by George Orwell Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen (it wasn’t till the second reading that [...]

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Trotsky: A Graphic Biography, by Rick Geary

I am aware that not everyone has an obsessive interest in Russian history and Russian literature, backed by a completely useless degree in same. I feel sorry for these people and can’t really fathom why they bother to get out of bed in the morning. Fortunately nonfiction graphic novelist Rick Geary has written a book [...]

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Severance, by Robert Olen Butler

At the height of the French Revolution, with a guillotine about to chop off his head, scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier prepared for his final experiment: following the decapitation, he would attempt to blink his eyes. If he were successful, there would be strong evidence that death from beheading was not instantaneous. The blade fell. Lavoisier blinked. [...]

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Make It Fast, Cook It Slow, by Stephanie O’Dea

Parents, colleagues, and friends have tried to teach me to cook. Websites and youtube videos have tried to teach me to cook. Cookbooks written for five-year-olds have tried to teach me to cook. All have failed. The best I could achieve was a scrambled egg, but even that was iffy because there were always all [...]

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Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Secondary characters in this story include An alcoholic who shares his apartment with dozens of sickly cats A teenaged shoplifter and vandal who sniffs glue A pedophile Then there are the two principals: Oskar, an overweight twelve-year-old boy, the victim of bullies, who has a continence problem and an obsession with murder Eli, a twelve-year-old [...]

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Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, by Jon Krakauer

Though many topics fail to capture my reading interests, two of my biggest turnoffs are football and warfare. Put the two together and you’ve got a book tailor-made to bore me to tears… unless it’s written by Jon Krakauer, one of the few nonfiction writers I follow by name. He selfishly insists on writing about [...]

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The List: Best of 2009 Aggregated Megalist, Third Update

Tallying of votes nears completion on the Best of 2009 aggregated megalist. You can download the full spreadsheet here. It now includes votes from 112 sources for 1,880 books published in the United States in 2009. This week’s additions include big sources like the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Salon, the blog Shelf Awareness, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, The [...]

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The List: Siege Mentality

Jericho, Troy, Minas Tirith: I have always had a bloody-minded fascination with stories of cities under siege. Historical fiction or fantasy, it doesn’t matter; detailed descriptions of siege engines are always a plus. Here are a few favorites: The engineering of siege weapons is described in loving detail in K. J. Parker’s Devices and Desires, [...]

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Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

We close out the week with Alan Bernstein’s revisiting of Melville’s classic story of men and the sea. I just finished reading Moby Dick for the first time in more than 40 years.  My recollection was a work that was lengthy, ungainly, ponderous, and poorly structured, containing long stretches of boring material dealing with whale [...]

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Das Leben der Anderen (2006), by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Today we take a thrilling trip to pre-unification Berlin, courtesy of Ceilidh Mapes’ review of the film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). German cinema has experienced something of a blossoming over the past decade with films like Goodbye Lenin!, The Baader-Meinhof Komplex and Downfall, but Das Leben der Anderen (in German with [...]

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Moon (2009), by Duncan Jones

Today, Mandy Malone takes us on a trip through director Duncan Jones’s film Moon. I’ve found that a certain amount of introspection comes with selecting books or movies to review for Blogging for a Good Book. In the process of describing why you like something, certain thematic patterns emerge that can prompt you to explore [...]

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Run, Fatboy, Run (2007), by David Schwimmer

Today we hear from Elisabeth Murray, who looks at David Schwimmer’s witty film Run, Fatboy, Run. It is hardly surprising that a movie that has a marathon at its heart begins with the main character running.  What is unusual is the situation surrounding Dennis Doyle’s (Simon Pegg) sprint.  He is in his finest for his [...]

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Farewell, Dick Francis

It has been a bad start to 2010 for fiction fans, and, sadly, we now need to add Dick Francis to the list of voices lost to us. Francis’ crime stories were a blend of thriller and traditional mystery, drawing on the best of both types of crime fiction. There was always a puzzle to [...]

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The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike

This week, BFGB welcomes back our writers from the WRL Circulation Services Division. We start off with John Livecchi’s review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick. Some novels are so riveting in the world their authors create that I find myself slowing down as I approach the end, the better to savor each page.  Later, [...]

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The List: Best of 2009 Aggregated Megalist, Updated

In the continuing quest to find the final word on the best books of 2009, Blogging for a Good Book continues to aggregate votes from every authoritative list of 2009′s best that we can find. If it was published in the U.S. in 2009, it’s eligible. Sources of votes that we’ve added in the last [...]

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The List: Great Nature Writing

I have always been interested in the natural world, and enjoyed writers who look at nature in interesting ways. Here are some of the authors who I think offer us insights into the world of which we are only a part. Many of these are older titles, but they still are among the best in [...]

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Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, by Thomas Mallon

Finally, our epistolary week concludes with a look at letter writing through the ages. Thomas Mallon writes about some of the finest correspondence down through history. In these days of text messaging and email, I have to wonder if a book like this will ever be written about correspondence in the 21st century. I suspect [...]

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The Thurber Letters

When most readers think of James Thurber, long-time New Yorker writer, what probably comes to mind is humorous short fiction, often with a sharp edge, or maybe his witty cartoons, where seals, dogs, and men and women fight their endless wars, or perhaps it’s Thurber’s books for children, which blend fantasy and playful language. While all [...]

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