Reading Archives - Page 11 of 25

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

August 26, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?! Consider this:

She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.

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City of Glass by Paul Auster

August 21, 2024 / Mystery-Suspense, Reading

A strange meta-detective novel with an unreliable narrator who slowly dissolves into insanity. I followed maybe half of the literary and Biblical allusions. Not at all what I expected, but oddly satisfying. I read it for the setting — Manhattan in all its grandeur — and so I can’t complain.

The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant

August 20, 2024 / ★★★★★, History, Reading

My quest to read all eleven volumes of Durant’s Story of Civilization continues. Volume VII has returned to the shelf with hundreds of scribbles and notes and many, many exclamation marks. If you think the world is crazy now, you ought to revisit these darker times of wholesale human butchery, religious wars and inquisitions. This has been an eye-opening and hair-raising experience.

Here is New York by E. B. White

August 20, 2024 / ★★★★★, Memoir, Reading

A beautiful, poignant essay of White’s return to New York after a long absence. He celebrates the eternal qualities of New York and the people it attracts, while mourning the loss of his New York, which can never be restored for New York is always changing. That’s what makes it special.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

August 18, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

The New York Times listed this book at the best novel of the 21st century (so far). I decided to hold off reading it until I had read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens as this book is a loose retelling of that story. That was probably a mistake.

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Move on Down to Mexico by Nicholas Grant

July 23, 2024 / Reading, Travel

★★★☆☆ | Travel and Nature | Digital | Borrow

Up to date guide on the requirements and steps to move to Mexico.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

July 20, 2024 / Reading, Spy-Detective

My third Slow Horses book. The plot of this one followed the TV series pretty closely, though there are more differences than the first two. The allure here is the continued depth of characters that grow and develop from book to book. Herron throws these well-established characters into tension and conflict and they respond predictably. It’s up to the author to put them into tighter and tighter binds to avoid becoming cliche. I’ll bet in later books, he has the characters become less predictable, otherwise this could feel a little too much like Star Trek novels. We’ll see.

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You Like It Darker by Stephen King

July 16, 2024 / Horror, Reading

This is a wonderful collection of short stories and novellas by our generation’s master storyteller. I enjoyed every piece, but particularly liked Rattlesnakes, a sequel of sorts to Cujo. It’s meditation on the persistent grief of losing a child masquerading as ghost story. I’ve read most of Stephen King’s shorter works. This newest one tops them all.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

July 14, 2024 / Reading, Spy-Detective

The second installment of the Slow Horses series. This one departed enough from the TV series to keep me guessing. Jackson Lamb is such a terrific character. Perhaps not great literature, but engaging and fun.

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Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

June 28, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I enjoyed the setting of the fictional small town on Puget Sound. I liked the premise of the story. I loved the octopus. But, in the end, the author was too young/naive to be inside the head of a grief-stricken 70-year-old woman. It would have been better had she let us imagine what she felt by her actions and words alone. Some big themes were drawn in magic marker when they deserved an artist’s paintbrush.