Charlaine Harris recently wrapped up her Southern Vampire Mystery series, more famously known as “The Sookie Stackhouse” novels. In my opinion she should have done so much sooner but one can look to previous CBR reviews I’ve posted to get into that. I heard Harris started a new series in a new location and though Sookie’s world became stale and tiring, that isn’t to say Harris is incapable of having a new one that is light and fun and full of mystery. Enter Midnight Crossroad, […]
Black Swan Green
If you’ve never read anything by David Mitchell I highly recommend starting with Black Swan Green. Mitchell is a beautiful writer with elegant turns of phrase and vivid descriptions, even when covering a slice out of the life of a lonely-ish 13-year-old boy in the early 1980s in small town England. Jason Taylor is the youngest child of a grocery store chain manager and a bored lonely housewife growing up in the town of Black Swan Green, a town that has no greens and no […]
Posthumous Poetry
Having been a longtime listener to This American Life I was somewhat familiar with David Rakoff’s writings but hadn’t really devoted much time to him outside the podcast. Our book club chose to read his posthumous work Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish to wrap up the year and it was an enjoyable read from an enjoyable man, who died far too early in life. What none of us expected when tackling this short “novel” was that the entire thing would be in rhyming couplets. […]
Gulp
Mary Roach’s Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal was something I’d seen on The Colbert Report and thought “huh that seems really interesting, I should read that.” But I know myself and I know that if it weren’t for my book club selecting it, I probably would still have it on my “to read” list. With Gulp, Roach seeks to explain how we eat, why we eat it, and what our body does with whatever we choose to consume. She does so with many humorous […]