When I travel, I take the train. A few days before Halloween, I found myself at an Amtrak Depot that offered a book exchange. Leave a book; take a book. They had a jar for donations to the staff’s holiday party. Though the selection wasn’t large, it included Gary Brandner’s The Howling. This werewolf novel… Continue reading Book Review: The Howling by Gary Brandner
Category: Book Review
Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. Going through my news app, I spotted the headline, but I probably wouldn’t have read the article, because I’m not… Continue reading Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel
Book Review: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek, when US Cavalry opened fire on a Lakota camp. The government called it a battle,… Continue reading Book Review: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair
In 1968, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris stood as one of the few government-funded and operated tributes to cinema in the world. Henri Langlois, who cofounded the organization in the 1930s, still ran it. During the 30s, he built up a large film library, and during World War II, as Germany occupied Paris, he smuggled… Continue reading The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair
Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
Good novels read themselves; bad novels require work. Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, a bad novel, required work. In fairness to the novel, as a historical romance, it’s not the genre I often read. But I wanted to read Tulip Fever, because there’s a film based on it that stars Alicia Vikander as the female lead.… Continue reading Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the so-called Age of Heroes. As we envy other nations for that connection, we struggle to fill this void with a… Continue reading The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Book Review: The Long Day’s Evening
It’s been a goal of mine–unsatisfactorily fulfilled–to include in these pages reviews not only of novels from my own country, but also those written overseas. A culture can become myopic if it views the world only from its own perspective. We read world literature not only to experience how vast and different the peoples of… Continue reading Book Review: The Long Day’s Evening
Book Review: Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews
Though set in modern times, when Putin is president of Russia, Red Sparrow reads like a Cold War spy thriller. As Jason Matthews, the novelist who wrote it, tells us in the narration, although the geopolitics had changed, the game remains the same. Nations keep secrets; their rivals struggle to learn them. This is a… Continue reading Book Review: Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews
Book Review: The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
There’s a theory–I’m not saying I subscribe to it, but it’s out there–that you can judge the times by the horror stories it tells. In my childhood and youth, stories about ghosts and vampires–life after death–prevailed. Later it became the slasher and the serial killer. Today it’s zombies. Everywhere you turn around, you’re surrounded by zombies.… Continue reading Book Review: The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Unfortunately at the movies last weekend, I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie based on Annihilation. Since I wanted to review the novel before I knew a lot about the movie, I’ve been avoiding the trailer. But it played at the theater, and since it would’ve been silly for me to leave as it… Continue reading Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer