I love this quote. I have had people ask me what my favorite book is and I can never tell them. I don’t have just one favorite or a few favorites. I have favorites in a million categories and, depending on what I read day-to-day, I am adding new books to the list all the time. “Picking five favorite books… Read more
Stephanie LaCava tells the story of her childhood — uprooted from New York to a village outside Paris — by focusing on the strange objects she collected and obsessed over in An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, but I ended up far more interested in the… Read more
I’ll say it up front: I am a pack rat. I come by it honestly. My father is a pack rat — he saves everything, and whenever you need some obscure bit of something, he normally has it. (Whether or not he can find it is a different story.) My mother is not one of us. She has no problems… Read more
If you think of punch as something in bowl with ginger ale, melting rainbow sherbet and fruit juice, this book will change your mind. The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry aims to take you back to the glory days of punch, when it was brewed from spirits, spices and not-too-clean water. Our sanitation has improved and… Read more
I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, which is always a good time to catch up on my audiobooks. I’ve got a stack of great audiobooks that the good folks at Macmillan Audio sent me, and I’ve been putting them to good use. I finished this novel sitting at home, warm and cozy with a cup of coffee —… Read more
Sometimes a book tells you things about the author. Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet, and some of that poetry seeps into his novel, Something Red. There is a certain lyrical quality to it that I appreciated, and I found that quite interesting, mixed as it was with a tale of murder and mayhem. The story is told through the eyes… Read more
I read Lake Country by Sean Doolittle while I was in Key West, back around Labor Day, and for some reason, never finished my review. I found, in my year-end clean-up, a small stack of things I meant to review but somehow never did, and I’m going to try and get those reviews caught up in January. Lake Country, for me, was… Read more
Redshirts may be the most fun I’ve had with a book this year. It made me laugh…and it made me go out and load my Kindle with other John Scalzi titles. I love the mix of humor and seriousness in the book, and I am looking forward to reading more. Are you a Star Trek fan? If you’ve ever watched… Read more
I’ve got a few new books to tell you about. I don’t think I requested any of these (I’ve been requesting fewer these days, as I’m trying to get caught up), and if I didn’t request it, a book has to be really good to make the review list. Let’s see if any of these make the cut: First, The One I… Read more
I am a firm believer that kids should have a lot of books, and this is a book that I would choose for my nieces and nephews. It’s funny, but I’ve seen the Nutcracker ballet, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the story before. Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffmann and illustrated by Maurice Sendak is wonderfully written, perfect for some… Read more