Posts in the Books category.
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February 10
Book: The Deluge by Stephen Markley
In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come. [more inside]
February 9
Book: The Cloisters
In this “sinister, jaw-dropping” (Sarah Penner, author of The Lost Apothecary) debut novel, a circle of researchers uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York’s famed Met Cloisters. [more inside]
February 4
Book: Children of Memory
The ark ship Endiku left the ruins of Earth to seek a new home for its crew. They make landfall and carve out a way of life, albeit at great cost. Many years later, the granddaughter of the ship's captain swears that she saw her grandfather enter the woods, and seeks to rescue him from the fabled Witch that lives in the hills. [more inside]
January 31
Book: White Horse by Erika T. Wurth
White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut from Erika T. Wurth about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit. [more inside]
January 24
Book: The Glass Hotel
Somewhere at sea, a woman goes overboard. Somewhere in New York, a financial fraud comes undone. Somewhere on a remote Canadian island, a window is graffitied. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, The Glass Hotel, knits together these strands in a story about self-invention, loss, and the ghosts of lives that might have been. [more inside]
Book: Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America's Cemeteries
The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. [more inside]
January 23
Book: Jeeves and the King of Clubs
Storm clouds loom over Europe. Treason is afoot in the highest social circles. The very security of the nation is in peril. Jeeves, it transpires, has long been an agent of British Intelligence, but now His Majesty's Government must turn to the one man who can help . . . Bertie Wooster. [more inside]
January 22
Book: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don't mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she's used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously. [more inside]
January 18
Book: The Measure
What would you do if everybody on the planet woke up one morning with the ability to know how long they will live? Would you even want to know? In "The Measure," that happens, and the book follows eight NYC residents as they grapple with the ramifications of that knowledge. Along the way, the book addressees some truly interesting questions, such as if you are 30 and know you will die at 42, is it selfish to marry and have children? If you are 30 can you marry somebody you know will die at 42? It also dives into the government response, and it's just as bad as you expect. I read this book in 3 nights, staying up late each night before forcing myself to put it down and go to sleep.
January 17
Book: Women Talking
"The Canadian writer Miriam Toews opens her astonishing eighth novel, Women Talking, with a matter-of-fact Author's Note. Between 2005 and 2009, she explains, eight men in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia raped many of the girls and women in their community, first rendering them unconscious with cow anesthetic. Women Talking is "both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination." It is also a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. And, surprisingly given the title, Women Talking is narrated by a man." [more inside]
January 16
Book: Chapterhouse: Dune
The 6th book in the Dune series, the novel chronicles the continued struggles of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood against the violent Honored Matres, who are succeeding in their bid to seize control of the universe and destroy the factions and planets that oppose them. [more inside]
January 14
Book: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me / Jennifer Teege
An international bestseller—the extraordinary memoir of a German-Nigerian woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. [more inside]
Book: The Great Wide Sea / M. H. Herlong
After their mother dies, Ben, Dylan, and Gerry want nothing more than for their lives to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Instead their father sells their house, buys a boat, and tells them that they're going to spend the next year sailing around the world. The boys hate the idea and also hate the experience--then they wake up one morning to find that their father is gone, they're lost at sea, and there's a storm approaching.
January 12
Book: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
"Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are" (Macmillan). [more inside]
Book: The Devil and the Dark Water
A murder on the high seas.
A remarkable detective duo.
A demon who may or may not exist.
It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Travelling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent. [more inside]
January 11
Book: Tales from the Cafe
From the author of the international bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book follows four new customers who hope to travel back in time in a little Japanese cafe. [more inside]
January 10
Book: Spare
The life story of Prince Harry. Previously discussed on the blue over here. [more inside]
January 4
Book: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World.
By Torie Bosch (Editor), Kelly Chudler (Illustrator)
Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities. [more inside]
Book: The Passenger
Cormac McCarthy returns with the first of a two-volume saga: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. [more inside]
December 29, 2022
Book: It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
Through the lens of horror—from "Halloween" to "Hereditary"—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. [more inside]
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