“ The Title Wave ” is the terrifically named used book store run by the Friends of the Multnomah County Library. Located in a charming forme...

Since we are in San Francisco to celebrate my sister's 40th birthday, thoughts have turned to cocktails. In particular, thoughts have tu...

I adopted both the Modern Library and Radcliffe Publishing lists of Top 100 novels of the 20th Century. Having finished all the books on t...

Junior League cookbooks are a big favorite of mine, and A Taste of Oregon , the Eugene, Oregon book is one of the best. So many of the reci...

Theirs Was the Kingdom by R.F. Delderfield is one of those "family saga"/"sweeping epics" that I would have eaten u...

Hmmmmm . . . I just got tagged by Karen Vanuska for the Six Random Things About Myself game. I am now torn between my enjoyment of making l...

The Sound and the Fury is much easier to understand if you realize that it cannot be understood from the get go, but only when it is co...

Oh! I am pleased as Punch because The Internet review of Books is going to publish a review of mine. This is heady stuff for a book geek. I...

The Size of the World by Joan Silber is less a novel than a collection of loosely interconnected short stories – sort of a literary ga...

Franklin and Lucy is an intimate look into the personal life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the women close to him. Joseph Persico ...

Only Henry James can take a beguiling idea like quasi-incestuous adultery, add an Italian prince, a billionaire art collector, and exotic...

. Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black , a collection of short stories by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer , has its hits a...

Penelope Fitzgerald (Dec. 17, 1916 to Apr. 28, 2000) was a prize-winning British poet, essayist, and biographer. She is an inspiration be...

Among my many other reading goals, I am trying to read at least one book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature . So far, I have...

I recently read two Booker Prize winners, Offshore (1979) and The God of Small Things (1997), when taking a break from slogging through H...

Following the death of his wife, the widowed narrator of The Sea spends a lengthy recuperative and reflective stay at the same beach town...

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge is a fascinating, anthropological novel following the lives and religious development of a group of Eng...

I just found, at my neighborhood used book store, a 1966 Modern Library edition of Goodbye, Columbus , with a near perfect dustjacket. This ...

Crescent City by Belva Plain has all the makings of a great historic saga: Jewish immigrants flee the poverty and persecution of 19th Cen...

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is The Nanny Diaries of the Nineteenth Century.

In Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations , Craig Nelson taught me that Thomas Paine was the Forrest Gum...

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is my favorite book about astronauts. Of course, it is the only book about astronauts that I will ever read,...

Community cookbooks enthral me. Junior League cookbooks generally lead the pack in this area, but church societies, chambers of commerce, an...

Every third Saturday of the month, the Crook County Library in Prineville, Oregon has a used book sale in the lobby. (Well, every third Sat...

Restless by William Boyd is one of the rare novels that is enjoyable from the opening quote to the final paragraph. The story goes back a...

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson won the 1990 National Book Award . I was reluctant to read it because I thought it was going to be too ...

I have mixed feelings about The Inheritance of Loss , the 2006 winner of the Booker Prize . The story was complex and engaging, but it see...

One reason I get through a lot of books is that I listen to audio books on my iPod . (See lists over on the right.) I get audio books on cd ...

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award in 1964. The story follows the life of the eponymous hero from...

Lee Child writes Jack Reacher books. Thankfully for all his loyal fans -- "Reacher Creatures" -- he turns out a new one pretty...

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher is a plot-driven family saga centered around Penelope Sterne, daughter of an artist and mother of ...

I am giving up on 1776 by David McCullough . Normally, I am too task-oriented to not finish a book once I start it, but I find it easier to...

Despite its title, I was surprised by how myth-centric The Centaur is. It is the story of a high school science teacher and his student s...

Look Great, Feel Great by Joyce Meyer caught my eye at the library. I had never heard of Meyer, but a book about weight loss and fitnes...

Other than The Joy of Cooking , which I bought when I was still in high school just because I loved it so, The Silver Palate was the firs...

Hard Times by Charles Dickens is one of the many Victorian Era classics that I had never gotten around to reading. But thanks to an audio...

Of the many lists of prize winners and recommended books I have going, I’ve been working for the past several years on reading the winners o...

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud is the moving story of an Italian-American stranger who works his way into the lives of an immigrant Jew...

In 1984, Anthony Burgess (best known for A Clockwork Orange ) published 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (reviewed here ). H...