The height of literary comedy? I don’t know. A Confederacy of Dunces follows the day-to-day lives of a cast of characters that all ultimately end up at the same place at the same time due to the ridiculous antics and poor choices of the main character, Ignatius. Ignatius is a 30 year old hyper educated, egotistical and out-of-touch bum living on the good will of his retired mother in New Orleans in the early ‘60s. After his incessant back seat driving gets her into an […]
John Snow Knows How to Save the World
London, 1849, you are a doctor and the dreaded disease, Cholera, is literally hitting the city the like the Bubonic plague. Your neighbor was fighting fit on Monday, and Wednesday morning you watched him go out on the corpse cart. The epidemic will go on to take over 50,000 lives before petering out a few months later. But based on its track record, you know it will be back. What do you do? If you’re John Snow, anesthesiologist and part-time medical investigator, you march through […]
I Wasn’t Charmed
I wanted to like this book, and there were moments of it that I enjoyed, but the sixty or so pages in between these precious paragraphs were enough for me to not recommend this book to any serious urban fantasy readers. The bones of a good story are there: a fairly congenial and funny protagonist, a supernatural world, a believable love interest, and a manageable cast of semi-interesting major characters. Where this book failed to capture my attention was in the protagonist’s narration and the […]
For the Love of Food!
I’d like to start out by saying first and foremost, I love food. Not the cooking of it; just the eating. If the food comes to me mouth-ready, I will eat just about anything. Until I read this book….one of Lovegren’s best qualities is really driving home the “gourmet” atrocities committed throughout most of the 20th Century. Seriously….someone in the 1920s thought combining peas, pickles, peanuts, and mayonnaise served in a piece of iceburg lettuce was the height of domestic sophistication. Oh and also presenting […]