In her debut novel, The Help, author Kathryn Stockett goes inside the homes of 1960s Mississippi to show the relationships between young white women and the black maids they employ.
Skeeter, a new Ole Miss graduate, is back home in Jackson, single and living with her parents again. Her two best friends, Elizabeth and Hilly, are [...]
Synopsis:
During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet [...]
I’m a little afraid of short stories. What I crave most in fiction is depth, characterization, richly drawn and fully fleshed-out people and places — not halved and truncated stories of people about whom I will ultimately feel nothing, if only because I never really got a chance to know them.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s stunning Interpreter of [...]
I can’t begin to tell you how I loved Ron Carlson’s new novel, any more than I can explain the difference between the Butter Pecan ice cream from Babcock Hall in Madison, Wisconsin and the same flavor anywhere else. If you tasted it, you’d understand. I’ll have a sample for you in a minute. (The [...]
Lillian’s father left her family when she was four years old and her mother turned to books for solaceturned to smoke and ashes. But they say the tin soldier melted into the shape of a heart. I can certainly understand why, but her daughter was left feeling neglected. Lillian turned to preparing special foods to [...]
Book of the Year?
I just read a book that I enjoyed so much (and exclaimed over so frequently) that Ron asked me if this could be my book of the year. Usually I pick a new book that I’ve liked and send it to the people on my Christmas list who might like it. This [...]
Home Run!
Yesterday I read The Sun Field by Heywood Broun and I just loved it. Broun was a journalist of the early twentieth century, a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, and the one-time novelist of this straightforward, engaging, and wildly entertaining book. It’s a pity he never wrote a sequel to this fast-moving [...]
I flat out love this book. The Celebrant has to be one of my favorite novels of all time. If it is not the best baseball novel ever written, then it has to be among the top three or five. Mark Harris must get his due of course, along with Bernard Malamud and Darryl Brock [...]
Atlas Shrugged is a brick of a book. No publisher would touch it today, for it is too long, too deep, and not written for a 20-something woman with a tenth grade reading level. If you like your literature in advertisement-style sound bites with head banger music in the background, don’t read this book. But [...]