Category: Fiction

At the start of Journey to the Centre of the Earth we meet Axel, our narrator, who’s in his late teens at the point when the story opens in Hamburg in May 1863. His parents are dead, and in the “dual capacity of nephew and orphan” he lives with his uncle, one Professor Lidenbrock, and…

I started this book knowing very little about 1600s Dutch history, so I was grateful for Robin Buss’s introduction and the background it gave about the real-life characters Cornelius and Johan de Witt, who were killed by an angry mob in 1672 after Cornelius was accused of an assassination plot against William of Orange. In…

As the inside cover blurb puts it, this is a novel about “eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation.” It’s Boccaccio meets Chekov in the Hudson Valley in 2020, and it’s precise and funny and tragic and I liked it a whole lot. The conceit—which is that a Shteyngart-like writer…

While the plot is predictable, and the setting (a fictional island in the very real Narragansett Bay, with some excursions to Portsmouth and Boston) didn’t have as much of a strong sense of place as I wanted/expected, and the characters talk like they’re from now, not 1846, I was still charmed by this book, which…

I somehow never had to read this book in junior high, high school, or college, so I don’t know if I would have disliked it as much as Tom Perrotta (who wrote the foreword to the edition I read) did when he first read it. Perrotta talks about how he “found the book strange and…

I think I bought this book my senior year of college and started reading it for a class I ended up dropping: I opened the book to find that I’d underlined/taken notes in the margins up to page 29, at which point I found a ticket stub for a student ticket to the ballet ($10!)…

In her introduction to the edition that I read, Anne Perry captures the appeal of the setting of this book, which takes place in the cavernous Palais Garnier, aka the home of the Paris Opera at the time the novel was written: “There are rooms beyond rooms, passages under and over other passages, and endless…

Like Animals makes me think of the Marina and the Diamonds song called “Savages”, though the vibe of Eve Lemieux’s book is more gritty and raw than the song. Like Animals tells us the story of Philomena, or Philly, in short dated chapters, which aren’t in chronological order: we start in 2019, jump to 2016,…

Early in this book, our narrator (Happy Doll, an ex-cop turned private investigator/security specialist) notes that he’s “become an armchair Buddhist,” which relates to the book’s title (which relates to the wheel of dharma). Happy thinks about karma and dharma and samsara, and co-exists with the ants in his sink rather than killing them, but…

Noir isn’t generally my genre, but my husband read this and loved it and I’m glad I read it too. The narrator is an ex-cop private investigator who finds himself trying to solve a crime that hits close to home while he’s also high on prescription painkillers and pot; in doing so he makes a…