Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve read a number of books that present themselves as short story collections, but which, when taken as a whole, comprise powerful novels.  I think one reason that this succeeds is that the author can approach the same topic from a number of different angles without losing the narrative thread that ties the whole package [...]

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High Spirits, by Robertson Davies

Although we generally associate ghost stories with Halloween and October, there is a long tradition in Great Britain of telling ghost stories around the Christmas season. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a classic example, with Scrooge being haunted by spirits who offer him one last chance to see the error of his ways. Robertson [...]

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney

Greg Heffley is being forced by his mother to keep a journal (“but if she thinks I’m going to write down my ‘feelings’ in here or whatever, she’s crazy”). Except we really probably ought to call it a diary, since that’s what it says on the cover, despite Greg’s instructions to his mother (“when Mom [...]

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Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Can violence be justified? Can we commit acts of righteous vengeance without being poisoned, perverted by our own violence?
These are the questions considered at depth by Joe Abercrombie’s new fantasy standalone novel Best Served Cold. As the novel opens, Monza Murcatto, a mercenary general, and her brother Benna go to a meeting with their employer [...]

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

I was sad to hear that the legendary movie producer/director John Hughes passed away last month. He was most famous for his teen movies of the 1980s, including The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but his best comic movie by far is Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It is the travel misadventure movie of [...]

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Body Movers by Stephanie Bond

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I was speaking with one of my colleagues about people who clean up crime scenes. Sadly, this has become a business–cleaning up people’s murders and suicides. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned a fiction series called Body Movers, which I decided to try. The first [...]

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Ghost Town, by Richard W. Jennings

This book was very different than I expected. Given the description of a book featuring a camera that can take pictures of people who aren’t there, wouldn’t you expect a scary story? After all, it is called Ghost Town. But no, there’s not a spooky page to be found in this book. [...]

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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, [...]

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Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story, by Leonie Swann

I thought it would be interesting to blog this title because the premise is so bizarre. I wasn’t looking forward to reading it, though. I’m not crazy about the idea of animals as sleuths. I was pleasantly surprised, however. Three Bags Full is not cutesy but quite tongue-in-cheek. The sheep act, for the most part, [...]

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King Dork, by Frank Portman

It’s a mystery, it’s a dark comedy, but most of all it’s King Dork.
Frank Portman’s debut YA novel (up till now Portman has worked as a musician) tells the story of Tom Henderson, a.k.a. King Dork, a.k.a. Chi-Mo, short for child molester, a cruel name given to him by the cruel “normal” kids after a high [...]

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