Oil! by Upton Sinclair
I had high hopes for Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Theses hopes rested in part on There Will Be Blood (2007), a movie based on the novel, a movie I loved. But the film, written and […]
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
Somewhere, around the 200th page, I thought to myself: Larsson needs to stop introducing new characters. Every one of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels contains a large cast of characters, but The Girl Who Kicked the […]
The Spy Novel: Cooper’s The Spy
We all love a good spy novel. At least, I know I love espionage thrillers. I have already reviewed several on this blog, including Red Sparrow, The Rhythm Section, and Leaving Berlin. The spy has […]
Ladies’ Man by Richard Price
Something is broken in Kenny Becker’s life, but he doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. At thirty, he’s stuck in a dead-end job, and he has mixed feelings about his relationship […]
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier had followed the course of life laid out for women in the Turn of the Century America. She married young, and her choice of husband was a businessman with strong ambition and rising […]
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
I don’t believe I’ve ever read any book that I have more trouble reviewing than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Though it’s classified as a novel, it is unlike any novel I had read before. In […]
The Reserve by Russell Banks
As you read a novel, you do not need to like the protagonists; in fact, it’s possible to hate the main characters and still enjoy the novel. You can sympathize with them, understand their problems, […]
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse tells the story about the titular character and his spiritual quest. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, who realizes he wasn’t suited for the traditional path towards […]
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Though I have a lot of good things to say about Blonde, I must confess it’s the novel that broke me. I read it as part of my ill-advised feature-writer series about Joyce Carol Oates. […]
Dune by Frank Herbert
Is Dune the perfect novel? Of course, perfection is what every piece of art—be it a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a film, or a novel—strives to be. But what does it mean […]