Clik here to view.
Twittering from the Circus of the Dead by Joe Hill
I'm a big Joe Hill fan. I've reviewed his three novels (Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2) here and last month I got to meet Joe at the Seattle Public Library. Joe is a great guy and not that scary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Blood Drama by Christopher Meeks
Christopher Meeks knows how to engage a reader and tell a story. His collection of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea showcases Meeks' mastery of small moments and was the book that made me...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Skulk by Rosie Best
Skulk is an urban fantasy set in contemporary London. While a casual bookstore browser might be inclined to dismiss this novel, which features a teen protagonist and a cast of characters who can...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, is set in 2001 in New York City. Pynchon is a careful observer, a wizard of wordplay, who is justly revered for crafting paranoid parables. The critics...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The novels of Daniel Pinkwater
I heard Daniel Pinkwater before I ever read any of his books. He was a goofy, friendly voice on the radio, talking to Click and Clack about some car problem or discussing children's books with Scott...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Little Green Men by Peter Cawdron
Little Green Men is a great, page turner of a story. It's a not a long story, more a novella than a novel, detailing the experiences of the crew of space ship Dei Gracia on a frozen, distant world. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian is one of the most perfect science fiction novels I've ever read. Originally self-published by Andy Weir, this tale of a man stranded on Mars quickly amassed over 1,000 five-star reviews on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rereading Ray Bradbury
How do these things start? I cannot say, for cannot recall important things such as the day I was born or the day I first read a story by Ray Bradbury. Ray claimed he could, recall the day of his birth...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
The Word Exchange is set in a world of words. It's a world eerily similar to ours, the geography is recognizable, the people seem real, but where we have iPhones and Kindles the characturers in Alena...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Way Inn by Will Wiles
In his first novel, CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS, Will Wiles did something I'd previously thought impossible; he made me care deeply about the removal of a wine stain from the floor of a meticulously modern...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
So there's an Inherent Vice movie coming out in December and I'm not too proud to admit that it's the movie that got me motivated to finally read Thomas Pynchon's novel of the same name. You know...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
Sarah Canary is a wonderfully deceptive book. The title suggests biography or a single life rendered in fiction, but Sarah Canary is something of a Maltese Falcon, a mystery and a catalyst for action...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Discovering Avram Davidson
When I first encountered Avram Davidson he was in disguise. I was a bookish teenager with an appetite for mystery novels. I devoured tales penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, John Dickson...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Empathy and Big Ideas
I recently read a couple of wonderful books by Ursula K. Le Guin that reminded me once again what a gifted and skillful writer she is. Le Guin is a master of the art of letting the reader see through...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town by Gregory Miller
I believe in ghosts. Perhaps not ghosts in the literal sense, but I believe a person's spirit can live on, in the stories that we've told and the stories that are told about us. I believe the good and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Golden Road and Beyond: A Grateful Dead Primer
I've been a Deadhead for about four decades now. It was a cassette of American Beauty that turned me on to Jerry and the gang. I know that they're not everybody's cup of tea, and that's alright, but I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Summer of Love, A Time Travel by Lisa Mason
Summer of Love, A Time Travel is a fine story. Lisa Mason takes three interesting characters, a time traveller from a future 500 years hence, a 14-year-old midwestern runaway flower child, and hip...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi
The Monkey's Wrench is a slim, wise novel. Primo Levi begins with the simplest of circumstances, two men in a remote location who pass the time by recounting tales of past jobs, and, in a totally...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ANTHILL: A Novel by E. O. Wilson
ANTHILL is a remarkable novel. Harvard professor E. O. Wilson has spent his life in science, devoting much of his work to the study of ants, but being a good scientist doesn't necessarily make a person...
View ArticleClik here to view.
WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler
We are all completely beside ourselves is a novel of profound empathy. The story is told by Rosemary Cooke, a woman who begins her story in the middle. Any reader who has glanced at the book jacket or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac: A Novel by Sharma Shields
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac opens in 1943 when nine-year-old Eli Robuck is abandoned by his mother who willing walks out of his life and into the woods with "Mr. Krantz", a giant, hairy stranger...
View ArticleClik here to view.
DEATH AND THE PENGUIN and PENGUIN LOST by Andrey Kurkov
Death and the Penguin is an odd tale, told well. Viktor, like everyone else in post-Soviet Kiev, is doing what he can and must to keep going on. Viktor owns little more than a typewriter, but when the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY by Charlie Jane Anders
The best books are like magic spells or time machines, they transform you, take you wonderful places, and show you amazing things. You forget that you are seeing words and pages, you hear and see and...
View ArticleThe Fireman by Joe Hill
I'm a big fan of Joe Hill's work and he's one of the few author's whose books I tend to buy as soon as they hit print, but I hesitated when I first heard the plot of his latest, The Fireman. A global...
View ArticleDesolation Road by Ian McDonald - A Review
I just finished reading Ian McDonald's 1988 science fiction novel DESOLATION ROAD and I am very impressed. I won't claim that this is an easy read, there are far more characters than I was able to keep...
View Article
