[isbn: 9781400102518]
Not a book I would have picked up on my own, Three Cups of Tea tells the inspiring story of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber  rescued by Pakistani villagers after a near-fatal failed attempt to climb K2 who then devotes his life to building public, co-ed schools in remote villages [...]

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[isbn: 0375425306]
Referring to stories as ‘clever’ is often shorthand for "interesting but ultimately shallow," while ‘inventive’ often means "very creative, but not a great piece of art." In both cases the admirable qualities are undercut by a lack of dimension and richness when considering the work as a whole and [...]

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A while back I posed a question about “literate genre fiction” to a list I belong to, specifically in the areas of mystery/suspense and scifi/speculative fiction and one of the people who responded said they “weren’t sure how literate they were, but the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers sure are fun!” That’s a pretty accurate [...]

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Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf is a fascinating exploration of the evolution of the form of books and the way that we handle and store them. Much of the history of what eventually became the books we know (scrolls, codices, illuminated books, etc) was familiar to me, but Petroski has a knack for bringing [...]

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I picked Black Cross up in the airport bookstore thinking the the author, Greg Iles, was someone else. There’s nothing horribly wrong with this World War II thriller of covert action behind enemy lines– it just seems interchangeable with a hundred other action-packed tales of derring-do, replete with larger-than-life heroic characters performing amazing feats in [...]

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Like many who have studied philosophy, Socrates has long had an established place in my intellectual pantheon. How could the man who essentially created Western philosophy occupy any lesser place?
After reading I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates I am left shaken. How could I have read so many works and listened to so many [...]

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I read two different versions of Beowulf, another on my long-neglected list. The first was an old Norton critical edition with a prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, the second also a Norton edition, but this time a verse translation by Seamus Heaney.
The Donaldson translation is good. I’m no expert, but it felt more ‘authentic’ [...]

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I revisited the Oedipus plays because I’d never read Oedipus at Colonus and the others were read first when I was too young and then as part of a University death-march through Ancient literature.
I was surprised how powerful the plays were in both mythological conception and language. I missed so much the first and second [...]

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My first thought when I finished Crumley’s relatively short novel The Last Good Kiss was “how have I never heard of this guy before?” That was followed quickly by “I have to find some more of his books.”
The Last Good Kiss is a private eye novel of the decidedly jaded variety. C. W. Sughrue is [...]

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I’m about 1/3 of the way through Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer and I’m already comfortable recommending it. The subtitle “A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” is apt– you don’t have to be (or wish to be) a writer to get a lot out [...]

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A week or so ago I signed up as a member of a small group of bloggers reading Proust. Since then I have been making my very slow way through Swann’s Way (yep, the $8.95 cheap-ass bastard edition– after spot-comparing it with the Lydia Davis translation, I saw no compelling reason to buy the latter).
I [...]

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This is how much I like Vernor Vinge’s writing: I purchased Rainbows End (there really is no apostrophe in the title) the first time I saw it, in hardback at full cover price, without looking at the price, the blurbs, or the jacket summary. It isn’t the classic space opera I was expecting based on [...]

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I was excited to discover that– serendipitously– an online book discussion group was going to be discussing Catcher in the Rye just as I was finishing my re-reading. Unfortunately, the second thread in the conversation revolved around whether or not Holden was “clinically depressed” and how much better it would have been for him if [...]

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Re-reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time in a couple of decades. What a splendid book. Like many youngsters, I used to identify with Holden. Now I recognize the strange blend of a character that is at once believable and yet wholly unrealistic… both because he is possessed of remarkable insight into human [...]

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Fiskadoro, Denis Johnson’s second novel, is a post-apocalyptic fever dream set in the Florida Keys, where a large group of people have survived thanks to two missiles that fell to earth as duds. Only the Cuban government– known solely as ghostly voices on the few surviving radios– is suspected to have survived, Christians and Muslims [...]

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I picked this up on a lark because I enjoy Nick Hornby’s writing so much. Too bad he only has one story in it! Speaking with the Angel is a collection of first-person stories by a kind of who’s who of young, hip writers (mostly from across the pond: Roddy Doyle, Colin Firth, Helen Fielding, [...]

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For the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time reading avant-garde writing. Post-avant poetry, the metafictionalists– I’ve been trying to get a handle on what’s happening “new and now.” Reading that work has elicited more than a few grimaces… though it makes me smile to recall Raymond Carver and the controversies of minimalism [...]

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Two collections of stories from the 50s-70s are collected in this volume, edited with intro and introductory story notes by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg. The first volume, The Future in Question, is composed completely of stories whose titles are in the form of a question (except the last story, by Asimov, aptly titled “The [...]

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