Building Stories by Chris Ware
★★★★★ Winter of 1993 saw the publication of Chris Ware’s first installment of The Acme Novelty Library. A staple-bound book, Acme Novelty #1 was just under forty pages and showed a range of Ware’s...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
Crusaders by Dan Jones
★★★★☆ In Crusaders, Dan Jones applies his significant story-telling skills to the people who fought the wars for the Holy Lands. Seventeen pages of concise identifications of the major characters reinforce his emphasis on...
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
★★☆☆☆ With his Ibis Trilogy, published between 2008 and 2015, Amitav Ghosh proved himself an estimable literary force: framed around the Opium Wars of the mid 1800s and set in Calcutta, Mauritius, and Hong...
Sea Witch Rising by Sarah Henning
★★★★☆ Sea Witch Rising is the sequel to Sarah Henning’s fabulous Sea Witch. This time two mermaids seek to become human, and the sea king is irate when Evie, the sea witch, helps them...
We Are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer
★★★★☆ “When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it’s futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth;...
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
★★★★★ Consider it Patient Zero, or Pandora’s Box: all of Western Literature can arguably be traced back to Cervantes’s 1605/1615 masterpiece Don Quixote. A picaresque novel about a mad knight errant and his squire...
A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
★★★★☆ “Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.” So, she had moved the 12 miles...
Our War by Craig DiLouie
★★☆☆☆ Political novels usually fall into two categories. Some books take themselves very seriously, composed of intellectual arguments thinly veiled with story. Others are entertaining airport/beach books that take today’s headlines and run to...
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
★★★☆☆ Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers wants to help us more accurately interpret the intentions of strangers, but does so in a way that’s disjointed and impractical. A variety of observations appear throughout: For...
