Zombies are in. From AMC’s smash hit television series The Walking Dead, to the movie Zombieland (and the upcoming film version of Max Brooks’ World War Z), flesheaters are everywhere. In fact, they’re so much everywhere that I’ve started worrying that zombies are reaching that too-much-of-a-good-thing spot that vampires reached right around the second Twilight…
During my interview with Kelly (which you should check out because it was really fun) and a recent conversation with Tom and Bookish, my affection for the books of Joyce Carol Oates came up. That made me realize that I had a couple of her books in my “to review” list. Blonde is a fictionalized…
No, not the UFOs* in your Aunt Gladys’s jello mold. And not the artisanal** foie gras, goat cheese, truffle, water chestnut, actual chestnut and quinoa stuffing from Saveur magazine, but mystery-thrillers. You see for me, mysteries are the palate cleansers of books. After I’ve read something deep, or gotten too genre-heavy, I usually turn to…
Remember last spring when everyone was having a lot of fun at Harold Camping’s expense for predicting The Rapture? He was utterly sure that he and his followers were going to be assumed into heaven. I was thinking of Camping and his ilk when I started reading The Leftovers by Tom Perotta. The Leftovers takes…
Remember way back like five or six years ago when you used to go to bookstores? Yeah, it was crazy. Well when I used to go, I’d browse curiously past the “staff recommends” section to see what was up there and whether there were any books that looked interesting. Middlesex was always there. Always recommended.…
You know sometimes when you’re out and you get a meal – say a burger – and it’s really very good, better than most burgers, in fact. But the problem is that it’s good enough to remind you of the BEST. BURGER. EVER. – and that’s when you realize that your current very good burger…
When you’re a scientist and you think of fictional personas that you might like to emulate, I think the easiest answer that pops to mind is Indiana Jones. I mean, come on: he’s a Professor, Archaeologist, Finder of Lost Things, and gun-totin’, whip-wielding, Nazi-beating collection of awesomeness. But you’ll probably be surprised to learn that…
A couple of months ago during The 30 Days of Books meme, I admitted that I had never read any Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol didn’t count) and to remedy that put up a poll to choose the Dickens book that would be my introduction to the Master. The winner by a narrow margin was…
What is it about dystopian books that can be so appealing? Is that they serve as cautionary tales for our own society, extrapolating to possible-but-hopefully-still-avoidable futures? Or is it the antithesis of “the grass is greener” argument, in that the societies pictured are so depressing and dehumanizing that they make us feel better about the…
One of the things that a pale, befreckled person looks forward to during a beach vacation is reading. Reading on the shady deck in the morning, reading on the couch at midday and reading under an umbrella while out on the sand. And the book that I was most looking forward to reading was one…
Stevil 