Spying on Whales by Nick Pyenson
★★★★☆ Is there anything more awe-inspiring than watching a whale, the largest creature on earth, gliding through the ocean and breaching, slapping its flukes onto the water? We travel and pay good money to...
Category: Book Reviews
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
★★★☆☆ Building a novel in threads is an easy way to create a seemingly elaborate literary system. Many authors construct their books with a series of alternating chapters, each named after the current moment’s...
Nevada Days by Bernardo Atxaga
★★☆☆☆ Nevada Days is Bernardo Axtaga’s barely-fictionalized novel chronicling his stay as a writer-in-residence at the Center for Basque Studies in Reno, Nevada. Outside the campus library, there’s a stall where they make coffee...
Wolf on a String by Benjamin Black
★★★☆☆ Benjamin Black’s “historical fantasy…(shows that) real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.” Wolf on a String is a brooding historical noir that imagines the sordid underbelly of Rudolf’s court...
Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard
★★★☆☆ Speeding home from his London office, thirty-five-year-old Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land surrounded by speeding traffic. Dazed and wounded from his accident, Maitland...
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
★★☆☆☆ While abandoned orphans fight and starve in Darfur, Rachel Khong offers Goodbye, Vitamin, the story of how her first-world life could actually be a lot better, all the while taking minimal responsibility for...
Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright
★★☆☆☆ The promise of Robert Wright’s title is not fulfilled in this personal narrative of his journey toward enlightenment and a deeper understanding of Buddhism. The Appendix of Why Buddhism Is True finally reveals...
Late Essays 2006-2017 by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★★ Book reviews, literary essays and literary criticism all appear to belong under the same heading of “writing about books,” but the difference between these three fields is more nuanced that some may think....
Bones of My Grandfather: Reclaiming a Lost Hero of World War II by Clay Bonnyman Evans
★★★★☆ In Bones of My Grandfather, Clay Evans recalls his boyhood fascination with World War II, specifically being mesmerized by his mother’s father, a war hero “whose legend had hung like a morning mist...
