Whitefly is a short detective novel by Moroccan writer Abdelilah Hamdouchi. Hamdouchi writes crime fiction and has had success as a screen writer of police thrillers. This novel was first published in Arabic in 2000 and translated by Jonathan Smolin in 2016. It is a noir-ish story of bodies washed up on the shore in Tangier. Are the deaths related? And why does one of the bodies have gunshot wounds? Detective Khalid Ibrahim, aka Laafrit, must rely on his instincts and connections both in the […]
One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.
Lord of the Rings – 5/5 I am revisiting Lord of the Rings this Thanksgiving season, mostly while I do yardwork and household chores avoiding work and staving off boredom and frenetic energy. I am also listening to the audiobooks this time, and the last time I read the books was in 2004. I also previously read them twice: in high school and then in college when the movies came out. Here some things about my reading: I always skip the songs, which almost always […]
He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles
The Tommyknockers – 3/5 Stars This book has some significant issues, but it’s also very good at a few things. The biggest issue is that it’s a little too on the nose with so much of the characterization and subplots. It’s a little too convenient that, for example, so many of the characters in the book are immune through slightly ridiculous ways to the central supernatural element of the book. So the book itself involves a writer living in a small town in upstate Maine […]
All this, and Helen ends up back with her husband anyway
I should have read The Iliad in college. It was assigned for a first year seminar for which I did less than half the reading. I’ve long been embarrassed by this fact, yet not at all motivated to make up the deficit. When I came to Song of Achilles, I had no idea who the narrator was, or his relationship to Achilles. I wonder if that’s a not insignificant portion of how beautiful I found this book, that I came to it unspoiled. Just as […]