Books

Faithful Place and Broken Harbor

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It sounds like an old chewing gum commercial: Do you want to double your reading pleasure? Then check out two more beautifully written psychological thrillers by Tana French. Technically, I suppose, they are murder mysteries in the police-procedural sub-genre, but… Read More ›

Privilege

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I suppose I’m biased. But bias or no, Privilege is must reading for anyone interested in the intersection of education, schools, and the American class structure. The full title of Shamus Rahman Khan’s sociological study is Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent… Read More ›

XO

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XO is the latest novel by Jeffery Deaver, two of whose books I previously reviewed — on August 27, 2006, and on November 23, 2009 — although I’ve read many more of his books than those two. In fact, I suspect that… Read More ›

Boston Cream

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I had never heard of Canadian crime fiction writer Howard Shrier before reading Boston Cream, part of Shrier’s series featuring Toronto detective Jonah Geller. In a recent interview, the author said that “some Canadian readers have said that these books are… Read More ›

Karin Fossum

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I’ve recently read two novels by Karin Fossum, and I’m about to start a third. So I apparently like them well enough…but it’s still hard to summon up a great deal of excitement about this series. Fossum, you see, is… Read More ›

Is God a Mathematician?

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Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? is a first-rate book, so why are there so many negative reviews of it on Amazon? The best answer, I suppose, is that there are always negative reviews on Amazon; any given book can’t be… Read More ›

The Windup Girl

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I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell… Read More ›

The Drop

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Six years ago I reviewed Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer ; I’ve read several other books by Connelly before or since, and I highly recommend them. In recent years I’ve read The Overlook, The Narrows, Lost Light, The Poet, Blood Work,… Read More ›

Food Matters

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Mark Bittman is not Michael Pollan, though they have some things in common. Bittman’s book, with the deliberately ambiguous title of Food Matters, is quite different from his standard fare. Bittman is best known for his cookbooks (and his appearances as… Read More ›

The Elfish Gene

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This is a rather unusual but definitely interesting book. The full title of Mark Barrowcliffe’s book is The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, and that pretty much captures it. Barrowcliffe grew up as a geek/nerd in England in the ’70s, and… Read More ›

Black Diamond

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Black Diamond, by Martin Walker, is the third novel in a series of deceptively quiet mysteries taking place in the Perigord region of France. The scene is St. Denis, a small town where Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges is actually the only… Read More ›

From Elvish to Klingon

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I know what you were thinking as soon as you saw this title. I can read your mind, so I know that you were thinking something like this: This is obviously a fluffy but nerdy book. It must be a tongue-in-cheek,… Read More ›

Denise Mina

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So far I have read seven novels by Denise Mina: Garnethill, Deception, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, and The End of the Wasp Season. Can you tell that I like the work of… Read More ›

Just My Type

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What a cool book! Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, subtitled A Book about Fonts, will tell you all you want to know about fonts, in a readable and mostly non-technical style — all you want to know, but not more… Read More ›