Category: Fiction

This is the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and while I still like this series featuring the young chemistry prodigy/sleuth, this book is not my favorite. I enjoyed it, but Flavia is set adrift in this book, and, as a reader, I felt like I was too. It’s hard to write about this book without…

This was a really good read for a Sunday when I was home sick with a cold/fever: it was good enough that I didn’t even feel too bad about not being able to partake in my usual Sunday evening activity (rock climbing). I think it’s better-written than the previous Veronica Mars book (The Thousand Dollar…

Last week the Fitbit Charge HR my boyfriend got me for Christmas finally arrived, and I’ve been loving it. It tells me how long I slept and how restless or not I was. If I go for a run, I can see a graph of my heart rate. It tells me how many flights of…

In the acknowledgments at the end of Ibid: A Life (A Novel in Footnotes), Mark Dunn thanks his publisher “for allowing this most recent, brazen attempt at redefining the American novel,” and his readers for “giving [him] the chance to convince [them] that history can be more than dry facts and dates. And that naughty…

I read Tono-Bungay for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn’t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of “a pragmatic narrator divided…

The paragraph-long review of Her Fearful Symmetry in the New Yorker calls it a “gothic story,” and it is, which is why I was willing to forgive some sort of over-the-top plot developments. (I disagree, though, with the last line of that review: I saw a few of the big revelations coming.) But, right: the…

I wanted to love this novel, which is set in 1966-1967 and centers on a twenty-nine-year-old book conservator who goes to Florence to restore damaged books after the Arno floods, but either it’s just not the book for me or I wasn’t in the right mood. Maybe my problem is mostly structural: after starting really…

At the start of Codex, Edward, a twenty-five-year-old investment banker with an English degree from Yale, is about to take the first vacation of his working career. Not that he’s actually going anywhere: he’s about to transfer to a different position at the company he works for, in the London office rather than in New…

I read Station Eleven in three days, and over the course of those three days I was entirely engrossed in this book’s story, in this book’s world. On the day I finished it, I read while eating my breakfast, closed my office door at lunchtime to read while eating lunch, and was so caught up…

Hotel World is a novel divided into six sections, each named for a grammatical tense (e.g. “present historic” or “future in the past”), and each (well, except for the last, which is broader) centered on a character with some connection to a particular hotel. As the back cover puts it: “Five people: four are living;…