Category Archives: Books

People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman by Richard Lloyd Parry My rating: 4 of 5 stars A riveting, unputdownable true-crime story. Terribly disturbing, full of fascinating details. A very complicated story, extremely well told. Congratulations to Mr … Continue reading →

Via Mama, actually, a thoughtful piece from the New York Times.

This wonderful essay from tomorrow’s NY Times. I am posting the whole text so I can keep rereading it myself. February 28, 2010 Essay I Was a Teenage Illiterate By CATHLEEN SCHINE At the age of 26, when I returned … Continue reading →

NYTimes picks for best books of 2007. How many have I read? And then there’s the entirely different question, how many do I own?                                       … Continue reading →

Friend and constant reader Richard Smith, late of the BMJ, has issued a challenge to his Facebook pals to read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which he claims to be as Russian a novel as an English novel gets. One thing … Continue reading →

. . . there is no way I can get all the books in this house read. So! I am now trying to polish off 1 or 2 a day, unusually for me, by plowing through one at a time. … Continue reading →

. . . in 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor woke up and decided to walk to Constantinople. He writes about this epic journey in A Time of Gifts (which is followed by Between the Woods and the Water). So far, it’s … Continue reading →

Let me save you $20 or so, by summarizing a promising-sounding but ultimately disappointing book, by Steve Leveen. The Little Guide to your Well-Read Life sounds so, so great to your average bookaholic. Alas, alas. Here are the contents: make … Continue reading →

I’ve decided to try to keep a list of all my finished–ah, there’s the rub–reading for 2005. Of course, it’s mid-February, and I’m only now getting started, so it’s not going to be a complete list. But I’m going to … Continue reading →