Best Books of 2017: John’s Picks
Every list of “Best Books” is purely subjective, hostage to one’s personal tastes and to the seldom-acknowledged detail that the evaluator is never able to read all the books available in a given year....
Author: John Formy-Duval
Sleep no More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James
★★★★☆ Murder in multiple guises invades the six intimate stories of death in P.D. James’ Sleep No More, with emphasis not on the victims but the perpetrators and how they came to commit this ultimate...
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Leonardo da Vinci may be the best biography of the year. It has certainly received the most hype, and in this instance it rises to the level of approbation...
Hope Valley by John Manuel
★★★★☆ Regional novels published by small presses face great difficulty gaining traction in the massive world of publishing. Tens of thousands of books are published each year, most of them by major publishers who...
The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “Pretty took the will to be so and the money to do it and the time to see to it and the sleep to maintain it, and Ella didn’t...
Unbound by John Shors
★★★★☆ John Shors’ thoughtful novels are all set in the exotic Far East, underpinned by universal themes of a search for love and the bonds that bring people together. Beneath the Marble Sky featured...
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz
★★★★☆ Lisbeth Salander is back! In all her dark glory, she is fighting against the forces of institutional greed that seek to control lives. Her fights for Truth and Justice have been rather unconventional...
The Templars by Dan Jones
★★★★☆ The Templars have been transported through the dust of history to occupy a place in our consciousness that transcends who they really were and what they actually did. Hundreds of books and numerous...
Pig/Pork by Pía Spry-Marqués
★★★★☆ Our love affair with pigs – more accurately pork – extends to the dawn of human existence. Excavations at the site of Medzhibozh 1 in Western Ukraine indicate that “wild boar were being...
