book review

I’m progressing through my reread of the Lord of the Rings for the first time in over twenty years. (I took a break to read an Agatha Christie, because Fellowship through me off my pace to finish a book a week. Gotta love a nice quick mystery to set things right.) While I’ve started reading Fellowship multiple times over the years since I last finished it, I’ve never even picked up the Two Towers. I thought I had a generally good memory of how it played out, compared to the film. Boy, was I wrong. It’s a great book, and

After the Lord of the Rings movie marathon this break, I realized it’s been a long (long) time since I last read the books. I’ve read the Hobbit not too long ago, but back in the day I used to read LOTR every year or so. I don’t think I’ve done that in at least 20 years. I’ve started reading the books aloud with Daniela, but that fizzled around the time Frodo got to the Barrow Downs. (So . . . pretty soon.) No time like the present to fix that oversight, however. I launched back into the books, not

This was such a stunningly good book. I usually read more squarely in the area of genre fiction. Fantasy, thriller, science fiction. I read books for escapism, so the fact that I loved this one speaks to just how great it is. Because it’s anything but escapism. Wells writes a memoir of her childhood, growing up in conditions that bring new meaning to the word squalor. She pulls no punches, portraying her family and the people she knew back then for both good and ill. Her father was both a raging alcoholic and someone who really wanted to be a

I have long admired Stephen King’s ability to create a riveting story. To just set up a premise that demands to be read. I think where he excels the most is in his ability to write characters we care about, and then his willingness to put those characters into extremely difficult situations. From there, he allows the premise to unfold, and he doesn’t shy away from put all those characters through the ringer. The Outsider is squarely in that sweet spot. I started reading it one evening, and the next thing I knew, it was almost midnight, and I had