So, I’ve mentioned the Monkey Wrench Gang  a couple times already, but now that I’m through with it I might as well put a few thoughts...

In his book Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut once gave out letter grades to his own works. He handed out some Bs, Cs and Ds, but he also gav...

A week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My Brother,  the so-called “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his da...

I don’t expect much when I pick up a posthumous work of a great author. I expect even less when it’s the fourth, and final, posthumous ...

I really enjoyed this one. We’ve talked about the sentence level writing here . It’s clever, it’s funny, and for an aspiring writer...

Why is this book getting two reviews? Well, because Parts I and II were originally published as two different novels, ten years apart. A...

My reading’s been all over the map this year, but since I hadn’t tackled any Civil War-era war stories, I didn’t see any reason to turn...

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty plea...

It’s been a couple weeks since Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son   won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and about a week sin...

Don’t know how I’ve missed mentioning this, but I’ve plowed my way through Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , and it absolut...

I have finished Part I of Don Quixote, so I thought it would be a good idea to stop and take stock. You’ve no doubt noticed that the boo...

It’s been a year since I read my first bit of Proust and started putting down a few random thoughts that came out of the experience, so ...

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished. Now, I love me s...

Philip Roth has been making headlines recently by refusing to publish anything new (he has officially retired from writing.) But I coul...

I read and loved Nineteen Eighty-Four , and there’s no denying the lasting influence it has had on our culture. ( A-hem! )   I’ve al...

If you read for plot, you might not get much out of Delta Wedding . The story follows the Fairchild family as they gather and make ...

I should say up front that Winesburg, Ohio   was not a book that I was just dying to read. We’ve dealt with Sherwood Anderson’s influe...

You may have already noticed, but I’m a big fan of Leaving the Atocha Station . In fact, I haven’t been this excited about a book in ...