Rob Lilwall is a middle school geography teacher who is, not surprisingly, bored with his life. He is 27 years old, has no significant other, and has no big plans for the future. So when he his old buddy Al emails Rob and asks him to ride with for the last leg of his round-the-world cycling trip, Rob says why not? So our hero hops a plane to the god forsaken Siberian town of Magadan. It’s on the Eastern side of Siberia and everyone he meets tells him he will soon die in the subfreezing cold. He is warned about…
Category: book review
Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
Bird Cloud is the name of a bit of property that Annie Proulx bought in Wyoming. Here she plans on building her dream house. Clearly she never got around to watching the brilliant Cary Grant film called Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House-or she would have known what to expect. As it is see falls in love with a bit land and decides to buy it and build a home there. A comedy of errors ensues. But this is Annie Proulx, author of the brilliant Shipping News, in which she manages to squeeze in the history of newspapers, boats, and…
Eat Pray Love
The story of a writer who wakes up one day to discover that she is not as happy with her life as she would have hoped. Much like the woman Julia Roberts plays in Larry Crowne, our hero finds that her layabout husband with his half-assed plans and never fulfilled dreams is not going to be a part of her future. She throws her hands in the air and leaves him. She instantly hooks up with a whiny actor and moves in with him, seeing as she gave all her worldly possessions to her soon to be ex-husband. While living…
Blood, Bone, & Butter
There are times while reading Blood, Bone, & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton that I find myself smiling from the simple pleasure of her prose. A good writer can tell you how she makes pasta. A great writer makes you want to dust the flour off your hands once she has finished telling you how she makes pasta. Gabrielle Hamilton is a great writer. The opening pages of Blood, Bone, & Butter paint an achingly beautiful portrait of an ideal life lived with the perfect family that you know it will go terribly wrong in short order. And when it does go…
Hit List:Antia Blake and Edward Ride Again
Laurell K Hamilton goes old school with Anita Blake in the 20th book in the series. Hit List is more monster hunting and vampire slaying and a lot less wicked sexual powers and Ardeur induced orgies. This is a good thing. The story opens up with Anita and Edward investigating a series of murders where weretigers are the victims. It seems that the Harlequin are following the orders of Marmee Noir and that they are still after Anita. The story takes place far from Jean Claude and Richard and the rest of the cast of thousands that make up Anita’s…
Man In The Dark by Paul Auster
The audio book of Man in The Dark was read by author Paul Auster and he does a brilliant job of bringing this odd story to life. His voice has a soft cadence and a deliberate touch which perfectly matches the slow paced story of a seventy-two year old man who can’t quit get to sleep. As our tale opens, we find our hero alone in the dark, staring at the ceiling he can’t see, surrounded by an emptiness that he can’t quite feel. To keep himself occupied, he tells himself a story. A man wakes up in a perfectly…
Hector and the Search for Happiness
Lesson No. 1: Making comparisons can spoil your happiness. Once upon a time there was a young psychiatrist called Hector who was not very satisfied with himself. Hector is a man on a mission. He wants to find out what makes people happy so that he can help his patients become happy, too. He is baffled that so many of the people he sees are not happy, even when they have nothing wrong with them and life should be good. Hector and the Search for Happiness is written in a simple and straightforward style. Not quite Dick and Jane, but…
Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead
I’d never heard of Neil Strauss when I found this funky looking book called The Game. It was all about how to pick up chicks. It was also about self confidence and what it takes to go out into the world and ask for something you have no real reason to expect you will get. It was a fun book. So when I saw Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, that sounded like a fun title, too. But not so much. Neil falls into that trap that everyone who has more material than they need for a story falls into. …
Time Travelers Never Die
I’ve always had a soft spot for time travel stories-from Groundhog Day to Back To The Future to The Time Traveler’s Wife-I love them all. So when I saw Time Travelers Never Die it sounded like my kind of book. For the most part Jack McDevitt does a good job with his time travel story, but it has a little too much Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to it for my taste. There are endless bits when our heroes have to hop about in time so that they can hide something, retrive something, or just skip waiting in line. A…
Endgame by Frank Brady
Bobby Fischer was possibly the greatest chess player who ever lived. Unfortunately, he was also as mad as a hatter. Endgame tells the story of Bobby Fischer from the moment he is a small child with a cheap department store chess set until he is a frozen corpse in Iceland being dug up for a DNA test. In between, he becomes an International Grandmaster, an obsessed religious fanatic, a diehard anti-Semite, anti-American, and all around world class asshole. I had heard of Bobby Fischer, but my main memories of him were as a slightly mad looking fellow with a large…