I accidentally ended up reading Gillian Flynn backwards, starting with Gone Girl, moving onto Dark Places, and finishing with Sharp Objects. I can’t help but feel like this reading order taught me a little something about Gillian Flynn, at least as a writer: her most recent (GG) has, to my memory, some of the least graphically disturbing violence compared to the other two, but the most monstrous female protagonist. This book’s protagonist is psychologically damaged, to be sure, but at her heart she yearns to […]
Encryption and immortality
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is, I think, a book that works very well if the reader doesn’t look for a ton of deeper meaning in its story just because it’s a “book about books” — a category which nerds and bibliophiles tend to over-analyze, looking for messages and aphorisms about life and wisdom in reading. Which is funny, because that’s kind of what Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly about. Clay, our main character, takes a job at the titular bookstore, and quickly notices it’s […]
Jump already, Laney!
Compared to its series predecessor, Off the Edge didn’t work quite as well for me. But I still enjoyed the story and overall continue to appreciate Carolyn Crane’s obvious talent for interweaving romance and suspense. In a genre that can seem a hackneyed (to me, at least) The Associates series so far stands out by distinguishing its operatives as pretty genuine nerds — shockingly handsome ones, of course — but real egghead types, with particular specialties that make them well-suited for investigative work. Macmillan, in […]
Biological imperative, my ass
Delusions of Gender is a truly interesting study of the (mostly flawed) studies in neurological science intended to explain gender differences between men and women that originate in the brain. It got a lot of press when it first came out a few years ago, and deservedly so — with nearly 100 out of 340 pages dedicated to footnotes and the bibliography, it’s impressively researched and satisfyingly comprehensive. Cordelia Fine’s main argument, after definitively surveying the field, is that neurological claims to identify and explain […]