December 2017

Here we are already at year's end and time to take stock. Another year of contrasts — started with a major reading slump and wrapped up with a string of genuinely excellent novels. I got through 72 books this year (an uptick from last), including 22 in...

"The world, Marsali, is like the weather. You don't change it. You don't shape it. It shapes you." After plowing through some hefty literary doorstoppers, and somewhere between a slice of foie gras and a glass of champagne, I wanted something...

"The responsibility for a woman's broken heart always fell to the man closest at hand." Can you imagine a more likable and endearing character than a melancholy cop? That's what we get with the police chief of North Bath, a quiet little town where...

"In life you shouldn't look back, at the risk of falling, if you want to move forward toward the light. You just have to focus on where your foot should land for new horizons: the past dies under our feet if we want it to." Pain and Tenderness...

"Such is capitalism: on the surface, it carries the promise of 'diversity,' 'competition,' 'freedom' for the consumer, but in reality, it only serves particular interests." Is there anything more ordinary than the round red tomato? Well, this...

"The main theme is knowing for whom we are fully present." I devoured this beast during a short trip to La Rochelle, and the timing worked because it's a brick, but I had time, I dragged my e-reader everywhere and Jonathan Safran Foer knows how to...

"Whatever problem you encounter in life, it has an equivalent in video games, and it's one of these four: enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. Nothing else." If Samuel Anderson, literature professor at the University of Chicago, thought his life was...