Though I read Girls Against God twice, I confess to you I don’t get it. So I am going to spend this review struggling to make sense of a novel I find nonsensical. And please know, when I say I don’t get it, I don’t mean I don’t like it, for I found it...
I cursed myself to finish every novel I begin. Sometimes, that is easy and thrilling, but over times, it becomes a chore. Operation Napoleon belongs to the latter group. But I finished the novel, and now I’m ready for my review. Here we go. When the Americans find a Nazi plane on a glacier...
I read Hallowe’en Party because of the Kenneth Branagh’s movie, A Haunting in Venice, which my research had identified as this novel the source. I have my doubts because the novel is set outside of London, rather than in Venice, it involves the killing of a thirteen-year-old girl, whereas the movie seems to people...
I read The Girl of the Sea of Cortez as a comprise. I have always been fascinated with Peter Benchley’s novel The Deep; at least, I think I will like reading it. I haven’t read it, but I saw the Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset movie, about a couple vacation in Bermuda. Being scuba...
Around 1986 or 1987, I went to a bookstore to find my next read. Now you know that I can’t go to scout out reading projects and leave without an hour, or at least not in those days when I took my time looking, analyzing, and deciding. I was bad at deciding and often...
On November 29, I suffered a stroke. I spent the month in a hospital and a rehabilitation facility. I was released on Christmas Eve, but I had a lot of recovery to do. To my frustration, I had to learn how to read again. And write. Much of my cognitive of my ability left...
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 I read to be about people. I confess this is a narrow, distorted view of the world, one that...
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, he had an unofficial mission: to help Henry Wharton, a British officer, visit his family and return safely to...
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 the story, Tom played a game that almost cost Jim, the runaway slave, his life. Tom considered it great...
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 directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, shares the “idea” of Sinclair’s novel, but not its plot....
