I liked Gogo Monster a LOT! It is the story of Yuki, a nine-year-old, third grade boy in Japan who hears monsters. It’s in traditional Manga format, reading right to left. I expected the format to drive me crazy, but it was surprisingly easy to adapt to. The layout expertly leads you from one panel [...]
Favorably reviewed in the New Yorker, Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, is a compelling read. Like Cole, the novel’s narrator is an African born post graduate student living in New York city. This small, memoir-like novel presents a ‘stream of consciousness’ recounting of the protagonist’s walks about the city and the characters he meets. [...]
It had been a few years since I had picked up a Stephen King novel, a patron recommended Under The Dome and I took it home hoping it would be a novel that would keep my attention and it sure did! Imagine waking up one day going about your business and suddenly an invisible dome [...]
I can usually take or leave most books on sports but somehow I am fascinated with ultra endurance sports that most people have never heard of, let alone read about. There was Dean Karnazes’ Ultra Marathon Man about one hundred mile marathons and now I’m captivated by Hell on Two Wheels by Amy Snyder. This [...]
Pascale LeDraoulec’s American pie: slices of life (and pie) from America’s backroads is a wonderful read to accompany this summer’s Adult reading club theme, “Novel destinations” as you learn both about our country and pie! LeDraolec is a food writer of Franco-American extraction and the first part of the book covers her travels from California [...]
At the library I came across a coffee table type book called Chicks with Guns by Lindsay McCrum and wondered if it would work as a present for my dad, who appreciates both guns and women. After flipping through it, I actually sat down and read it and it was very interesting. First of all, [...]
Crooked Letter,Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin is the story of two boys, one black (Silas) and one white (Larry), who become friends in rural Mississippi. The story takes place in the late 1970s/early 1980s and there still seems to be a lot of racial tension here. Larry’s dad owns 500 acres and his own business [...]
The Sherlockian by Graham Moore is a delightful and satisfying addition to the oevre of Sherlock Holmes tales written by other authors than Conan Doyle. The book tells two stories. The first story is contemporary and focuses on a possible murder among the Baker Street Irregulars, the pre-eminent Sherlock Holmes society. In this tale we [...]
If you read 2003’s The Nanny Diaries, and want a better written, more sobering look at the strange life of rearing children in New York City, you will enjoy Victoria Brown’s recent novel, Minding Ben. It tells the story of 16-year old Grace Caton’s move from Trinidad to Crown Heights, Brooklyn and hence to Manhattan [...]