Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
★★☆☆☆ Asymmetry reads like the product of a promising young writer having completed a very good creative writing MFA program, who is subsequently unable to write much beyond a meta discussion of everything she...
Category: Book Reviews
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
★★★★☆ Carmen Maria Machado’s debut Her Body and Other Parties is a stunningly good collection of unsettling tales, each of which grow beyond their bodily horrors into metaphorical meditations on sex and identity. Using...
Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig
★★★★☆ After staying for a few months at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found mysteriously dead in his room on March 24, 1946. He was due...
The Wine Lover’s Daughter by Anne Fadiman
★★★☆☆ The essayist, critic, and radio mainstay Clifton Fadiman is an entirely fitting subject for a book, but even more appropriate is to have that book be a brilliant love letter from his daughter....
Devotion by Patti Smith
★★★☆☆ Patti Smith’s Devotion is a concise and special compilation consisting of three works that explore the author’s creative process. Two narrative essays bookend the eponymous story “Devotion”, a short and bittersweet tale of a young...
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
★★★★☆ Before we moved out west, my wife and I lived in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn for three years. It was a strange, beautiful neighborhood, an oasis of massive, single-family Victorian homes nestled between busy...
Winter by Ali Smith
★★★★☆ The second volume of her seasonal tetralogy, Ali Smith’s Winter is a hazy Christmastime tale about a family reuniting over the winter holiday. Like Autumn before it, Winter uses a relatively simple plot to...
Ethics: The Art of Character by Gregory R. Beabout
★★★☆☆ If you only vaguely remember Plato’s cave analogy or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or you are confused as to what passes for ethical behavior in our current fraught times, then Gregory R. Beabout’s succinct...
Best Books of 2017
This week, we’ve had each of our critics post a summary on the Run Spot Run blog of the three best books they read this year. It’s always an interesting exercise for a group...
