The Physik Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, is an interesting book about witch craft and modern academy. Connie Goodwin is a grad student of Harvard, just completing her qualifying orals and thinking about her dissertation, when her mother calls. Connie is asked to clean up her grandmother's old, abandoned house, which she agrees to ( Read more... )

Allison Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession, has a pretty self-explanatory title and sub-title. Bartlett is a freelance journalist who initially wrote an article about the subject and then went on to make a book out of it. The main subject is John Gilkey, a con man ( Read more... )

Those of you who listen to Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! or WBUR's Only a Game will recognize Charles P. Pierce as Charlie Pierce. In Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, his recently released book looks at how the American war on intellectualism manifests ( Read more... )

So this is the 5th book in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Usually, this late in a series, it becomes very difficult to talk about plot without giving away what has happened in the previous books, since they would build on each other. This time, Erikson takes us to a completely different continent and introduces us to a completely ( Read more... )

I recently finished up the third of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Memories of Ice, and then went and read book 4, House of Chains. It's hard to tell much about the plot of these two books, since in many ways, the first 4 books are one, gigamantic book. Memories of Ice takes up the story soon after the events of Gardens of the Moon (book 1), and ( Read more... )

In The Veil of Gold, Kim Wilkins tells the story of Daniel St. Clare and Rosa Kovalenka and a golden bear. Rosa, a Russian who grew up in Canada and is now living in St. Petersburg, is supervising the reconstruction of an old bath house when one of the workmen discover a golden bear hidden inside one of the walls. Unable to determine much about ( Read more... )

I just finished Erikson's second Malazan Book of the Fallen, Deadhouse Gates. Another rousing story. Some characters from Gardens of the Moon show up, noticeably Kalam the Assassin, Fiddler the Sapper, Crokus the thief, and the formerly really scary girl now known as Apsalar. But there are plenty of new characters, which seems to be a necessity ( Read more... )

In yet another episode of reading thrillers for the library, I read John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In the early '70s, George Smiley has been forced out of the Circus, the British spy agency. His old mentor, known only as Control, recently died after a power struggle, and so Smiley is on the outs. Then he gets brought back, ( Read more... )

I just finished reading Gardens of the Moon, the first book of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. To begin with, I should just say that, in this case, daysofourknives is my god, mostly for reminding me of the name. This was a fun a read.

The Book of the Fallen (an interesting title for a series, using the singular) is set in a world of high ( Read more... )

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is one of the books I "read" primarily in the car, as an audiobook. I like history audiobooks, since I get the gist of the "story" while doing other things, and then if I want to get the details, I can always pick up the book, but I don't have to be intimidated by a 600 page book. (It intimidates me ( Read more... )