Published in 1867, Thérèse Raquin is Emile Zola's first novel and a magnificent proto-noir thriller.  All the necessary elements a...

Appropriately enough for a book about math, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani is more than the sum of its parts. It is the story of a math prodi...

  Lost in Translation * is an imaginative and satisfying novel by Nicole Mones . The protagonist, Alice Mannegan, is an American living in...

The Bone People by Keri Hulme is a difficult book about identity, love, and belonging.  Hulme tells the story of three tough-as-nails c...

Moby Dick is one of those classics that I never got around to reading. So, while I am on a 19th Century lit jag, I picked up the audio ve...

  Laurie King's mystery, A Grave Talent , was King's debut novel and the first in her San Francisco-based series featuring police...

James Lee Burke writes wonderful, literary mysteries. He has a couple of series going, but his most famous is his Dave Robicheaux series, f...

Nineteenth Century novels in general, and Charles Dickens novels in particular, have captured my fancy lately. When I mentioned my current...

Do not describe Gary Presley as confined to a wheelchair! Nothing raises the hackles on this feisty author faster than this unthinking co...

Samuel Shem is famous for his 1978 best seller, House of God – a humorous expose of hospital intern life and still a “must read” for ma...

I won! Back to blogging as soon as I calm down a little.

Dang! I hate it when my job interferes with my hobbies.

Although it is a rainy Labor Day weekend here in Portland, tradition calls for grilling. So I turned as always to License to Grill by Chris...

Life and Times of Michael K is a Booker Prize winner by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Despite the credentials, I did not like this book ...

This is a guest review cross-posted from one of my favorite book blogs, Letters on Pages . You can find many great reviews there, mostly of ...

Cathy at Kittling: Books cribbed the Reading Questionnaire used with authors at the book trade blog Shelf Awareness . This appeals to me the...

OK, thanks to Adam at Letters on Pages , I learned how to add a list of my favorite book blogs to this blog. It is now over there on the rig...

I came later to William Styron , only reading Sophie's Choice because it was on the Modern Library list. Styron's books appear o...

In Sophie’s Choice , William Styron does as masterful job of telling a horrific tale in bearable way. Sophie is a Polish Christian who su...

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 ...