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...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
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...
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
★★★★☆ In January 2015, neurologist Oliver Sacks learned that the ocular cancer he had battled years before had metastasized to his liver. He was given six to eighteen months to live. Upon hearing the...
Katalin Street by Magda Szabo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Centered on the 1944 occupation of Hungary and spanning nearly thirty-five years over a handful of chapters, Katalin Street follows three neighboring families during World War II and the...
London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford
★★★★☆ “The Elizabethan and Jacobean mind was brilliantly elastic.” “Thinking a project achievable somehow made it so.” In London’s Triumph, Stephen Alford succinctly captures the expanding worldview of an insular nation that grew from...
Monograph by Chris Ware
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Chris Ware is one of the greatest cartoonists working today and the sumptuous Monograph provides all the proof one needs to understand this fact. Monograph is a memoir disguised...
The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
★★☆☆☆ Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s The Library at the Edge of the World is a feast of the senses for the middle aged female reader. Bonus points if: you love comfortably safe prose, you can juggle...
Mrs. Osmond by John Banville
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ With Mrs. Osmond, John Banville has achieved an unthinkably bold feat: adopting the sumptuous prose of Henry James, Banville has penned a sequel to James’ celebrated masterwork The Portrait...
