A lifelong fascination with ants led me to read one excellent book last year (see my review of The Lives of Ants) but now I’ve chanced upon an even more remarkable book. Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, by famed wildlife photographer and writer Mark W. Moffett, is just the [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
What a dazzling premise! Charlie Huston posits for his sci-fi thriller Sleepless: A Novel an alternative early 21st century in which a tenth of the population has turned sleepless, a condition that torments and eventually kills the afflicted. Into a familiar, yet ghastly Los Angeles, Huston plunges Park Haas, the last honest cop, and his [...]
There are two kinds of atheists. One branch obsesses over religions and their foibles, the other shuns any religiosity. I’m in the latter category and have avoided biblically slanted literature since Sunday school, so I only tackled Philip Pullman’s controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ for a book club. Oddly enough, I [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
Walter Mosley’s character-based crime fiction series are such pleasure to read. He has the uncanny ability to imbue every page, even in midst of a speedy plot, with the thoughts and memories of his core character, so much so that the prime joy of reading is in growing into the heart and mind of that [...]
Also posted in Crime Fiction |
Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as [...]
The Twelve (sold in America as The Ghosts of Belfast) by Stuart Neville fizzes with energy from its first paragraph. Irish paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is dizzingly portrayed as an alcoholic has-been tormented by twelve ghosts of his brutal past, ghosts who torment him to exact vengeance on other Sinn Fein heavies. After the first action-laden [...]
Also posted in Crime Fiction |
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, by distinguished American historian Joyce Appleby, is a tour de force of broad historical writing. We all imagine we ‘know’ what capitalism is and how it must have arisen out of older ways of societal organization, but of course we know nothing. From the very start of her [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s nomadic, taciturn action man, has recently been compared to Philip Marlowe. Marlowe he isn’t, but amongst the panoply of male antiheroes so treasured by us mystery/thriller readers, Reacher definitely stands out. The ultimate baggage-free male (literally and emotional), he’s unnoticeable until the world needs him, then becomes brutal, rational, efficient . . [...]
Also posted in Crime Fiction |
Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer than a novella, 117 pages in a slim volume, but not longer by much. Yet the reading experience rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
I bet I’m not the only one drawn to the notion of a complete fresh start, some way of casting the past aside and beginning with a tabula rasa. In Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Sydney author Andrew Humphreys, a businessman wakes up in hospital after being knocked unconscious by a falling kite. He [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |