Category: Fiction

Two things that are true: 1) I don’t read that much SF. 2) When I do, I sometimes get a little impatient with world-building. I don’t know if there’s a cause/effect relationship between those two things, and if there is, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but I did…

If I’d known beforehand that Slade House is a kind of companion to The Bone Clocks (which I haven’t read—James Wood’s New Yorker piece about it made me unsure if I wanted to), I’m not sure I would have picked it up. But I think it works as a standalone piece, and, I don’t know,…

All the Birds in the Sky is the kind of crossover genre book, like, say, Lev Grossman’s Magicians books, that I can really get into. It’s smart and funny, and self-consciously places itself in/plays with genre conventions (quest narratives, saving-the-world stories, stories of outcast geniuses) and other literary conventions (star-crossed lovers, a sort of fairy-tale…

I don’t know what to say about American Gods, other than that I quite liked it, despite feeling like some parts of it lagged. (This may have been partly due to circumstances: while I was reading this book I got a cold, and when I have a cold I tend to be a bit grumpy…

In a section of The Egyptologist that’s presented as a piece of scholarly writing to be included in a forthcoming book that one of the (unreliable) narrators is planning to write about his (yet-to-be-realized) discovery of a tomb of an (apocryphal) Egyptian monarch who (perhaps) wrote a text called the Admonitions, we get this: The…

At the start of The Golden Globe, our narrator, Kenneth Valentine, aka Sparky, aka various aliases, is in a production of Romeo and Juliet somewhere out past Pluto. He’s playing Mercutio; the actress playing Juliet is indisposed. He convinces the director to let him play Juliet and Mercutio for this performance, which works out nicely:…

Bright Lines is more of a sprawling family novel than what I usually read, and I think that fact hindered my enjoyment of it in some places: I wanted it to be more tightly focused on a single character than it is. Instead, we get bits and pieces focused on the various inhabitants of a…

Dryland is an atmospheric coming-of-age novel with an interesting narrator and tone. This review by Megan Milks on Goodreads points out the way that the novel “defies expectations of coming of age narratives,” and I think that’s right on, and is one of the satisfying things about the story. The narrator, Julie Winter (who’s a…

Full disclosure: my boyfriend met Liz Moore at a film screening a few years ago, and his ongoing acquaintanceship with her (which included the three of us having lunch together one day this summer) is what prompted me to check this book out from the library—I’m not sure I would ever have found it otherwise.…