John Stuart Mill was a philosophical piñata. Break open his mind and it would be chock-a-block full, with treats enough for everyone, no m...

He was the master of using fiction to discuss hot topics and was feisty enough to go after politically correct taboo subjects. He was at th...

Abbeville is a short, well-written novel built on a solid structure, but it should be twice as long to do justice to the story John Fulle...

The jury awarded over $1.5 million in compensatory damages to my client, finding that she was sexually abused by her stepfather when she was...

Much to my surprise, I figured out that I have read 100 books already this year. I usually read about 100 in a whole year, so I am not sure ...

Bookforum.com just added my John Stuart Mill review to their system of telling people about things they might want to read. It's in the...

My stock as a book geek is rising! My review of Richard Reeve's new biography of John Stuart Mill is the top review in the current edit...

Oh, it is hard to come home from vacation! How nice it was to spend two weeks away from work, doing nothing but peeping at leaves, avoiding...

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

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

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

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 rea...

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

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

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

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 aud...

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

Havoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett is a mystery and a morality play and a historical novel all rolled into one. In 1630, John ...

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is a perfectly crafted tragedy that describes the way a life can go so easily astray. Through the eyes of...

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson spans generations of a Jamaican family, focusing first on Ida Joseph who, as a te...

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...