Brian K. Vaughn is one of those comicbook writers whose name I cannot speak without emitting a dreamy sigh after it. This is similar to the way I said “Fonzie” when I was ten. I…
Posts tagged 2012 Books
Half-Blood Blues
After two, or maybe three false starts, I finally made it through Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Usually, I wouldn’t be so dogged in reading a book that didn’t seem to be working for me, but…
The Middlesteins
On its surface The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is the kind of the book I dismiss out of hand. Jewish suburban ennui? Been there. A fat character wrecking her family? Done that. Unhappy marriages and…
A Wrinkle in Time
As I recently confessed over in Book Riot’s Buy, Borrow, Bypass for most of my life I thought I had read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Turns out I read Watcher in the Woods,…
Sad Trombone Ending
Glory Fleming is a seventeen-year-old piano prodigy living with her widower father in the Bronx. Frank is the hunky, artistic boy next door, a recent arrival from Argentina. When the two meet things start to…
My Favorite Novel of 2012 (unless something changes in the next five weeks)
We’re in the waning months of 2012 and I think I’ve read what will be my favorite novel of 2012. It’s Carol Rifka Brunt’s fantastic, heartbreaking, and all together wonderful Tell the Wolves I’m Home….
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
The older I get the more I truly believe ignorance is bliss, especially if you’re the type to put heroes on a pedestal. I am that type and while the crumbling of the pedestal is…
Tiny Beautiful Things
One of the best things about reading Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar was the memories it brought back. You know how you sometimes have memories that come…
Quiet but Mighty
One of my favorite things about being a reader is having a physical reaction to a book. Whether it’s tears or goosebumps or laughter, or in the case of Joshua Henkin’s The World Without You…