The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Though I know there are several wonderful stories with animal protagonists, I tend not to read them. I guess I suffer from a homo sapiens prejudice when it comes to literature. I want the stories […]
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The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, the spy was Harvey Birch, who reported to George Washington. His mission was to watch British troop movements and learn what he could of their intentions. In the novel, […]
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Since I had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) before reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), I first met Tom Sawyer in that novel. It wasn’t a welcome meeting. Towards the end of […]
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kim by Rudyard Kipling isn’t a spy novel as much as a novel about the type of person who would be recruited as a spy. Kimball O’Hara is a street urchin living in Lahore. A […]
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 […]
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 […]