I've been reading several books by Nobel Prize winners lately, in part because I signed up for this Nobel challenge , in part because...

So, I am about halfway through John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand , the new biography by Richard Reeves, and I still do not know if JSM w...

America, America is Ethan Canin’s masterful portrait of American political life on the cusp of Watergate, balanced between the relative n...

In the six weeks or so since I adopted a Summer Reading List , I've read several of the books on the list, abandoned others, and added q...

Having greatly enjoyed Secret New York and Secret San Francisco from the same series, I was looking forward to reading Secret Portland ...

Ah, Napa Valley. In my mind, I love to hate it. The traffic, the commercialism, the tour buses, the conspicuous consumption -- there are so ...

Henry James is not one of my favorite authors, although I feel compelled to read his books because he so powerfully influenced 20th Centur...

Starting with Ceasare Mondavi's first ventures in Napa Valley after World War II, through the family's tumultuous history, to ulti...

The Studs Lonigan Trilogy is James Farrell's masterwork and a classic of American "realism." Modern Library included the tri...

Portrait is certainly more accessible than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake , but it lacks the delightful wordplay and zany, ambitious flight...

An appropriate review for I n d e p e n d e n c e D a y ! Resistance Fighter by Jorgen Kieler is a commanding, first-hand account of t...

Matt Love, Nestucca Spit Press publisher and author of Red Hot and Rollin': A Retrospection of the Portland Trail Blazers' 1976-77 ...

Empire Falls is Richard Russo's Pulitzer -winning story of the Roby family of Empire Falls, Maine. Russo tells the tale primarily ...

All the Pretty Horses is the bastard offspring of a mating between Ernest Hemingway and Zane Gray, with some William Faulkner apparent in...

OK, the Summer Reading List I started with has gotten all cattywhompus in less than a week, so I am starting over. This new list reflects t...

Midnight’s Children is the pseudo-autobiography of Saleem Sinai, the first baby born in independent India. Saleem tells the story of hi...

After reading a recent review of Life of Pi on The Complete Booker , I have been pondering memorable books in general and Booker winners in...

Two days into my summer reading list and I'm already messing with it. I finished Hallam's War and am about to finish Water for Ele...

To describe Hallam’s War as an interesting, substantive Civil War novel is to explain both its strengths and weaknesses. Elisabeth Payn...

Elizabeth at CvilleWords gave me the idea of creating a summer reading list. How could I resist? This is the list of the ten books that I ...

My full-length review of Franklin and Lucy has been published in the June edition of the Internet Review of Books . Most exciting. Here i...

Living in Oregon, it seems like a worthwhile goal to read books by Oregonians or about life in Oregon. According to Portland Monthly magaz...

“ 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...