Blogroll

Microreview: The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

There’s certainly one thing Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin did. It had me pondering how, among other things, age impacts my reading tastes.

About halfway through a noted author’s new novel set in South Dakota and its history, I gave up. I picked up a postapocalyptic novel, one of my favorite SF subgenres. I put it […]

Microreview: Brodeck by Philippe Claudel

“I had nothing to do with it.”

That’s what the title character says in the opening sentence of Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck. And while Brodeck is right, he has been given the task of detailing how the small village in which he lives felt it had no choice but to kill an outsider.

There are […]

Book Review: Get Out of the Way by Daniel Dinges

The individual experiences of soldiers during the Vietnam War are the basis of some excellent books, whether the nonfiction combat memoir, combat experiences as the basis for fiction or the recollections of soldiers who deserted and went to Canada. With his novel Get Out of the Way, Daniel Dinges presents a different perspective, that of […]

Microreview: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

A 975-page novel probably isn’t the best for the first “microreview,” especially one as widely praised and condemned as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

The book won two of France’s highest literary awards before being translated into English — although it is written by an American. It is the fictional, but exceptionally well researched, memoir […]

Book Review: The Appointment by Herta Müller

In announcing that Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said simply that she is someone who, with her poetry and “the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” In The Appointment, the work of hers most recently translated into English, Müller shows that landscape is not limited […]