“Imagine a marketplace teeming with vibrant stalls, each overflowing with treasures not of gold or silk, but of words and worlds waiting to be explored. This, my friends, is the bibliophilic bazaar I invite you to wander today, where each book beckons like a whispered promise, a portal to hidden dimensions of experience.” Thanks for […]
Archives for 2023
Short Review | Words on Fire by Jennifer A. Nielsen
2023-08-20 · by ·
This summer our 12-year-old started a book club with her friends. I expected them to settle on something more fantastical–maybe Brandon Mull or Jessica Day George. Instead, they chose a more serious-looking story, Words on Fire by Jennifer A. Nielsen, about a young girl in Lithuania in the late 1800s. I was intrigued and decided […]
Review | The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
2023-07-29 · by ·
Opening this weekend, Chris Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has a run time of 3 hours, is very light on CGI, and is rated R for sexuality, nudity, and language.* Released in 1986, Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb is 896 pages (or 37 hours on Audible) long, has zero CGI scenes, and, well, is not rated […]
Short Review: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
2023-07-14 · by ·
Neil Gaiman has his fans, and they are passionate. I’ve enjoyed a book or two of his, myself. But when Norse Mythology came out in 2017, it felt like the Gaiman fans turned out in droves to read (what looked to me) an opportunistic money grab by the famous author. Thor: Ragnarok, the second—and best—of […]
Happy Birthday, Tom Clancy
2023-04-12 · by ·
My first introduction to Tom Clancy and his world of espionage and military techno-thrillers was The Hunt for the Red October. Dad handed it to me sometime in my early teens, and I remember seeing the movie with him shortly after it came out. I’ll never forget it. it. I remember Sean Connery’s character, Russian […]
Review | The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
2023-03-06 · by ·
As I write this, it is March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (or an “Unhappy Disturbance” if you were British) on a cold night in 1770. It started as an argument between a British soldier and several Boston residents and soon escalated as a crowd gathered, chasing the soldier back to the Customs […]
Review | Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri
2023-02-08 · by ·
It is for books like this that I joined a book club. The elevator pitch for Everything Sad Is Untrue is this: it is the story, told in first person, of middle school-aged Daniel Nayeri, a refugee from Iran, grappling with life in Oklahoma, divorce, and, generally, being different. Told in snippets, memories, flashbacks, and […]
Short Review | Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willmer
2023-01-04 · by ·
There are books that are great not because of how they are written, but because of the information they carry, the story they tell, or the truth they convey. Forty Autumns is just such a book, great because it tells a story that is heartbreaking and tragic, because it is true, and because it is […]
