I have often thought that the best first sentence in a novel is in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied [...]
I first learned about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts when I read a review of it in the Washington Post here. Suitably intrigued, I picked it up and read.
The Feminine Mistake darts around like a minnow and continually circles back to a couple of core points. It is a little Momento-ish since each chapter [...]
Recently, the Queen of England came and went (Carter had some interesting comments here in a post titled “Send the Queen Home”).
Isn’t it totally absurd that any modern country has a heredity ruler (figurehead, whatever)?
Jeremy Paxon (author of On Royalty: A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families) was on the Daily Show with [...]
A new Wonder Woman, written by Jodi Picoult, is coming out. I really enjoy graphic novels and think that they (hands down) make the best movies (300, Sin City, A History of Violence, V for Vendetta etc).
I am certainly excited to read what Picoult produces despite the fact that I have never read any of [...]
When I picked up A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright, I thought I was going to read a steampunk novel. However, what I got included a lot more. In many ways it was like The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (which I wrote about here) meets V for Vendetta (plus more).
There [...]
While I generally enjoyed the book, the problem with Everyman by Philip Roth is that it is a little inaccurately sold. The book is a collection of memories of a single man (supposedly an ordinary man) that starts with his funeral.
The problem is this: the main character isn’t ordinary. His father is a well-off jewelry [...]
