Each year I try to summarize what I read, in hopes of improving and enjoying my reading more. Last year, I lamented reading too much fluff, and promised to read “better” this year, whatever that means. I religiously track what …
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Book Review
Some Rise by Sin, by Philip Caputo
Philip Caputo has written some masterpieces of people and cultures in conflict. Best known perhaps for A Rumor of War, his Vietnam novel, I was first exposed to him reading Acts of Faith, a tragic book about aid workers in …
Bright Air Black, by David Vann
Myth is bloody business. Bright Air Black is a retelling of parts of Jason and the Argonauts, from the point of view of Medea. It is….poetic…grisly…tragicomic…eerie…chilling at times. And although it allegedly weighs in at 288 pages, I read it …
Reading The Three Musketeers, by Dumas
So, encouraged by my good friend and author Thomas Jensen, I’m reading The Three Musketeers. I won’t recap much of the storyline, but: D’Artagnan, the earnest young hero from the Gascon countryside, comes to Paris, meets Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, …
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice was the “it” book of science fiction in 2013. It won the 2014 Hugo, the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Locus, and other awards. The list of books that have simultaneously won those awards is the pantheon …
Song of the Exile, by Kiana Davenport
Song of the Exile is an extraordinary, powerful, heartbreaking novel. It follows the lives of Keo, a native Hawaiian who burns to play jazz, and Sunny, a Korean/Hawaiian student, as they fall in love, are separated by the tides of …
The Knowledge, by Steven Pressfield
You probably know Pressfield as the author of Gates of Fire. Or maybe The Legend of Bagger Vance. Or maybe The War of Art. All amazing works. The Knowledge is like no other Pressfield book. Hemingway famously said “Writing is …
A Conversation with Jim Fusilli, author of CRIME + MUSIC: Twenty Stories of Music-Themed Noir
As I’ve previously written, Books & Music go together so naturally it’s hard to imagine them separately. But that pairing is usually implicit. So it’s a pleasure to stumble on an anthology of Noir short stories grounded in the world …
The Last Supper, by Charles McCarry
Charles McCarry might be the true heir to John Le Carré. His spy novels have plenty of thrills, but focus on the human aspects of espionage, the betrayals, the inability to trust anyone, the costs of being “in the business”. …
The Girl from Venice, by Martin Cruz Smith
From it’s evocative cover to its low key, upbeat ending, The Girl From Venice is an enjoyable, surprisingly romantic outing from Martin Cruz Smith. Martin Cruz Smith has a history of writing highly intelligent characters into interesting, atmospheric locations that …