Blue Christmas
Blue Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews was a wonderful indulgence for me. It’s a lighthearted, breezy jaunt through the holiday season in Savannah, Georgia. Antiques dealer Weezie Foley is desperate to win the historic district’s annual decorating contest – especially s ...
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The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
An overtly, unapologetic sentimental triumph, The Bad Girl follows the exploits of Ricardo, a man born in Peru, and his love affair with a woman who goes by the name Lily, an ex-pat from Chile. Ricardo spends an entire 1950s summer with Lily, holding hands, kissing chast ...
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Dead Heat
Dick Francis was a famous jockey; then he became a famous mystery writer; now he wants to be part of a famous father and son mystery-writing team. Dead Heat is the first Dick Francis thriller to be centered on Max Moreton, a somewhat celebrated chef.
Max is havin ...
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Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Giving is about exactly what the title says: Bill Clinton wants to encourage you to give to charity, and breaks up the book into 11 separate chapters on how you, gentle reader, can go about giving more of yourself than you ever thought possible. It is not a direct campai ...
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Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe
Miyuku Miyabe really should wear a t-shirt that reads, “I’m huge in Japan.” Her hugely popular, best-selling works have barely made it across the ocean, and it is difficult to understand why. Brave Story might be the book that changes that. At over 800 fun-filled ...
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Sin City
I thought I might feel shy reading a book about brothels in public. Sin in the Second City is about the notorious Everleigh madams – and the Levee District in which they operated – in early 20th century Chicago. But instead of feeling shy, I found myself eager to shar ...
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Spook Country by William Gibson
At the heart of Spook Country, Gibson lays out a very interesting idea: how much of our day-to-day lives can really be tracked? Set in modern times (unlike his prelude to the Matrix movies, Neuromancer), Spook Country deals with two intersecting, but very different, worl ...
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The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall
I am incredibly scared of the world in Stephen Hall’s stunning debut novel. In it, Eric Sanderson wakes to find that he has no personalized memories. He can recognize objects for what they are, but when he looks in a mirror, he does not recognize the face staring back ...
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Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich
Ah, vintage Stephanie Plum. Is there anything better at taking your mind off of the world than spending a couple hours with Stephanie, her on-again (in this book, at least) boyfriend Morelli, the sexy, Rock-like Ranger and Lula, the former prostitute? The only thing mis ...
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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini’s staggering, heartbreaking follow-up to his best-selling The Kite Runner is one of the most impressive novels about life during modern warfare ever written. Set in Afghanistan over the course of three decades, A Thousand Splendid Suns follows the marriage of ...
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