Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
★★★★☆ If you’ve never heard of Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success is the book to win you over and send you to Goodreads to add his entire back catalogue on your to-read list. With five...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
★★★★☆ What is the cost of living? How do our choices affect us? What compromises must we make in order to have a fulfilling life? By what metrics do we measure the days of...
No Good Alternative by William T. Vollmann
★★★★★ No Good Alternative is the second half of William T. Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies, a sprawling two-volume presentation on the world’s energy consumption and its resultant environmental dangers. Together, the two parts of Carbon...
Not Quite Not White by Sharmila Sen
★★★☆☆ Sharmila Sen’s Not Quite Not White is articulate and engaging, so it’s all the more unfortunate that it fails to draw meaningful, practical conclusions about America’s imperfections. In this memoir/manifesto of a first-generation...
The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
★★★★☆ Originally published in 1966 and reissued this summer by Picador, J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel The Crystal World is a metaphysical, conceptual adventure through the jungles of Africa. Edward Sanders, a doctor specializing in...
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...
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...
