The Clock Of Life is a coming of age story set in the American South. It’s 1974, and Jason Lee Rainey has just started school. On the very first day, he makes friends with a black kid named Samson, and gets bullied for pursuing that interracial friendship. Even if Jason Lee is living in the post-Civil Rights era South, the residue… Read more

Ian Nash is having a remarkably bad day. He has been kicked out of his PhD program, which means no degree, no job, no income. As if that isn’t bad enough, when he stops at a local coffee shop to drown his sorrows (and maybe pick up a job application), he’s taken hostage by bank robbers. What else could go… Read more

I was caught up in the book from the very first chapter. Terrier Rand comes from a family of thieves – burglars, second-story men, con artists and grifters. (All named after breeds of dog, for reasons that are never fully explained.) His brother, Collie, is on death row after a killing spree that included an elderly couple and a nine-year-old… Read more

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd is the story of Lysander Rief, a London stage actor who has come to Vienna in search of a cure for his sexual problems. He gets his cure, although not quite in the way he planned. Rief meets a crazed woman in his psychiatrist’s office, a Miss Hettie Bell, and from that moment on,… Read more

I think I’m over the whole “novel told in stories” idea. I tried not to let that influence me when I read Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld. It’s a decent novel. It meanders a bit, tells the stories of the lives of a group of Tribeca residents. The stories are identified by address, with a lot of overlap and some surprising… Read more

One of the best reasons for joining a book club is that it encourages you to read books you wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. Several years ago, I read The Known World by Edward P. Jones for a book club and counted it as a gem that I would probably have never read otherwise, and I would put Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth… Read more

Carry the One has a dramatic beginning: it’s the evening of Carmen and Matt’s wedding and they are surrounded by their family and friends. It’s a non-traditional, very Bohemian wedding at a farmhouse owned by Alice, Carmen’s sister, and Jean, both artists. In the wee hours of the morning, several party guests — drunk, stoned and sleepy — are making their… Read more