One of the books that I’ve enjoyed recently is Night Film by Marisha Pressl. In it, Scott McGrath, a down-on-his-luck reporter is drawn into a deepening spiral of intrigue as he investigates the apparent suicide of the famous film director Stanislas Cordova. You see, it was over-zealousness in a story digging into allegations about the…
Not that you’d know it from the appalling lack of book reviews here (or any other posts, really), but I had a good “book year” in 2013. Several excellent ones, mostly good ones, with only a few clunkers or disappointments. I even succeeded in my Goodreads Challenge of reading 45 books — though it was…
The Bible tells us that there is nothing new under the sun. And, at least in terms of book and movie plots, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the similarities between stories and themes that appear time and time again. Sometimes though it’s not just themes that are revisited but occasionally you might have…
Sometimes expectations are a hard thing. You root for a sports team that’s supposed to be terrible and a .500 season feels great. If that same .500 team was supposed to vie for a championship, the season was a disaster, right? The same might be said for certain books. Unknown authors can knock your socks…
Book series – they are both a boon and bane to readers. A boon because they can allow readers a richer connection to favorite characters and have the capacity to explore long, subtle plot arcs. A bane, perhaps, because sometimes when the well goes a little dry for the author, we tend to hang on…
In our increasingly polarized society I think there’s one thing that I hope we can all agree upon, and that is: Carnies are creepy. And put those carnies in a traveling circus, and guess what? Über-creepy. There’s something about the way that they just appear in town one day and are gone another. They are…
It wasn’t until I was a graduate student that I had any real exposure to Indian culture. One of the things about it that raised a lot of curiosity in me was that it was a culture that even in the late 20th century seemed to function pretty seamlessly with a good deal of arranged…
I admit that I had a certain amount of skepticism about Joe Hill as a writer. Being the son of Stephen King, I couldn’t help but think that just maybe he hadn’t quite earned his entrance into the world of publishing the way that other writers had. I felt a little vindicated with this feeling…
A couple of months ago, I was casting about for a new audiobook to listen to and it happened to be right as Goodreads was releasing its Readers Choice Awards for 2011. Melissa Marr’s novel Graveminder won Best Horror, so I decided to give it a shot. In the story, a young woman, Rebekkah Barrow…
One of my favorite books from a couple of years ago was Kraken by China Mieville. I enjoyed that audiobook so much that there was a part of me that had some trepidation about reading more of Mieville’s books because I worried that maybe they wouldn’t be as good as that first one, right? Please…
Stevil 