Tag: books
member name: Mike C.
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December 08, 2009 09:30 AM EST --
I have had a peculiar fascination with the novels of John Irving since Garp. I have relished his quirkiness and the predilection he has for going just to the edge of impossibility and making it . . .
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November 19, 2007 05:42 PM EST --
Roth does another study of near-death from his own perspective as an older writer and this one is even more chilling than the last venture into the subject, “Everyman.”Nathan Zuckerman has . . .
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January 07, 2008 06:11 PM EST --
Grinberg, Henry- Variations on the Beast
Seldom do I ever recall a more odious, thoroughly unlikable, unsympathetic, arrogant, self-centered and psychologically warped protagonist than Herr Kapellmeister . . .
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September 30, 2009 04:23 PM EDT --
Dan Brown has hit a formula and he is not going to give it up. Why should he? The formula has paid off in two best sellers and two hit movies with a third likely on the way. The formula is basically . . .
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October 15, 2009 08:13 AM EDT --
Southern novels have a flavor all their own. You can’t take a New Yorker, plunk him down in Louisiana and have a “southern novel.” Dayne Sherman is a native southerner, has his master’s . . .
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November 23, 2009 11:53 PM EST --
Wolf Hall is a somewhat misleading title for Hilary Mantel’s Man-Booker Prize winning novel. The actual place is the family home of the Seymour family, one member of which, Jane, rose to . . .
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November 25, 2009 10:57 AM EST --
This is a very sneaky novel. I was tempted to put it down after the first couple of chapters. There have been a lot of novels lately about unemployed men, middle-aged angst and marital trials and . . .
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November 30, 2009 10:01 AM EST --
Paul Auster constructs a strange world filled with lies and violence and betrayal, gives us several different looks at it, deconstructs it and we end up with all the mess. Briefly, and too concisely, . . .
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December 01, 2009 02:54 PM EST --
Ted Kennedy had a lot of scores he could have settled with his memoir that turned out to be published posthumously. He had a lot of enemies: almost everyone on the Conservative Right to start with. . . .
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July 06, 2008 05:25 PM EDT --
This is a very sad funny little novel. It is also Jonathan Miles' first after a career as a sports and mystery writer and essayist. Its structure is very strange, but understandable: Bennie Ford is . . .
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February 14, 2009 05:21 PM EST --
I admit at the start a distaste for the rush of “time travel” works that have flooded all media lately. It seems to me that “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” remains the most successful . . .
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December 16, 2007 10:10 AM EST --
I admit to an almost irrational weakness for the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Somehow, with very rare exceptions, she draws me into the world between her covers and keeps me there until I reluctantly . . .
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December 21, 2007 10:58 AM EST --
I have not read Cormac McCarthy before, primarily because I am not generally a fan of post-Armageddon formats, but seeing "No Country for Old Men" made me curious and I picked up "The Road." . . .
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April 07, 2008 02:54 PM EDT --
Tim Winton is flat out brilliant. I met and interviewed him years ago in Boston and we talked for hours about his favorite settings, characters, life-view and the place of Western Australia in both . . .
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June 17, 2008 11:31 AM EDT --
Tobias Wolff writes taut short stories that often select a moment in a person's life, define the moment and go as deep as the moment will allow, then move on. Or he establishes a small cast of characters, . . .
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October 24, 2008 09:27 AM EDT --
This is an extremely difficult book to read at this time in or political lives. It is a novel but it is also a thinly disguised version of the life of Laura Bush. Some of the references and parallels make . . .
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October 26, 2009 03:25 PM EDT --
Nick Hornby, a British writer of some renown, has been made famous by his books, but also by the films made from his books. High Fidelity was translated into a John Cusak vehicle and moved to the . . .
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November 14, 2007 12:06 PM EST --
I was irritated with Perotta’s hit “Little Children” andinfuriated by this work. With the same kind of cast: woman adrift, manguilt-ridden and confused, children to manipulate, etc. . . .
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December 15, 2008 02:17 PM EST --
Philip Roth has of late been concentrating on aging and death. Everyman and Exit Ghost were about the aging and death of old men. While musing about death and dying and disease is not unusual for . . .
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January 02, 2009 09:16 AM EST --
Yeah, I know that a college setting is perfect for satire of all sorts of things: you have venerable buildings housing hormone-loaded late teens, the most freedom any of them will ever have again in their . . .
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