I like a good social history and I love beer and wine, so Last Call really sounded like a win-win situation for me. This is Daniel Okrent’s history of, well, the rise and fall of Prohibition. Let me confess here that I skimmed much and could not … [Read more...]
Book Review: Russian Winter
January 11, 2011 By 4 Comments
This book was on the list of top ten books for the year at As the Crow Flies, and so I added it to my to-read list. It’s the story of an aging ballerina, a modern languages professor and a woman who works in an auction house all brought together when … [Read more...]
Books that changed my life: an odd combination
January 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
This week's blog hop from Crazy-for-Books asks the following question: "What book influenced or changed your life? How did it influence/change you?" You can participate in the blog hop by clicking on the button above and going to … [Read more...]
Book Review: Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting
January 6, 2011 By 2 Comments
A lot of things that don't normally make me tear up have been causing some flow lately, so who knows what's happening there, but this book jerked some tears in several places. This is the story of Michael Perry’s first year living on a farm in … [Read more...]
How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?
January 6, 2011 By 10 Comments
This week's blog hop from The Blue Book case is: How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?This is an interesting question, and one I think about a lot, as I would like my stepdaughter to become someone who gets as much … [Read more...]
A Thousand Splendid Suns: Everybody’s Protest Novel
December 30, 2010 By 3 Comments
Let me say first of all that when I read The Kite Runner for our college’s Common Reading a couple of years ago, I was not the only person to say, “But what about the women?” So it’s good to see a book in which Hosseini answers that question. Well, … [Read more...]
Under-appreciated literary fiction
December 25, 2010 By 7 Comments
What literary title do I love that has been under-appreciated? A tough one, in part because it's hard to decide exactly what "under-appreciated" means. I confess that I don't read a lot of book reviews. I used to, and then just found that the … [Read more...]
Top ten fiction books I read this year
December 19, 2010 By 6 Comments
These are the top ten works of fiction I read in 2010. Note that these are just books I read this year, and not books that came out this year or even recently. It’s hard to judge what’s best with fiction, but I went for a combination of enjoyability … [Read more...]
What do you consider the most important in a story: the plot or characters?
December 18, 2010 By 5 Comments
Interesting question from the Book Blogger Hop sponsored by Crazy for Books. For me, it's definitely the characters. I'm a sociologist. I find people and how they think and, especially, how they interact with each other, infinitely fascinating. … [Read more...]
The top five nonfiction books I read in 2010
December 14, 2010 By 4 Comments
I sat down to write about just the 5 best books I’d read this year, but surprisingly found that the first 4 I put on the list were nonfiction. I grew up a hardcore fiction reader. I was the kid who jonesed to get to the library in the summer. There … [Read more...]
