by Cindy | Jun 26, 2015 | Fiction
Rating: A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Books (2013), 432 pages. Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was a finalist for the 2013 Booker prize. It has been praised in over thirty reviews from major newspapers and magazines as “masterful,”...
by Donna | Jun 1, 2015 | Nonfiction, Other
Rating: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. South Dakota Historical Society Press (2014), 448 pages. Laura wrote this autobiography in 1930, and tried unsuccessfully for many years to get it...
by Cindy | May 9, 2015 | Nonfiction, Other
Rating: The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, by Michael Booth. Picador (2015), 400 pages. As a geography-challenged American, the Scandinavian countries have always been bunched together in my mind into one...
by Donna | Apr 30, 2015 | Nonfiction, Other
Rating: Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, by Richard Henry Dana. Signet Classics (1840), 432 pages. This book is quite well-known and already has legions of devoted fans; my purpose here is to urge reluctant readers to give...
by Donna | Jun 6, 2013 | Fiction
Rating: Stargazing Dog, by Takashi Murakami. NBM Publishing (2011), 128 pages. Stargazing Dog was first published in Japan in 2008, where it has sold over a half million copies. It’s a relatively short graphic novel that should take about a half hour to...
by Cindy | Feb 27, 2013 | Fiction
Rating: The Murder of the Century, by Paul Collins. Broadway Paperbacks (2011), 325 pages. Nostalgia for the past, this book reminds me, is almost always for an imagined past. When I think of how publishing and news “used to be,” I imagine...
by Cindy | Feb 2, 2013 | Fiction
Rating: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. Crown (2012), 419 pages. Flynn is a writer in the mystery and crime genres—two categories I almost never read. Her latest book, however, was described as a psychological portrait of a marriage—a plot I almost always want...
by Donna | Jul 20, 2012 | Fiction
Rating: Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung. Viking (2010), 288 pages. I don’t know if there any other novels about abandoned Russian children raised by feral dogs. (If you know of any, please let The Book Shark know!) The fact that Dog Boy may be the only such book...
by Donna | Jun 22, 2012 | Fiction
Rating: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages. I borrowed this from a friend with the understanding that it is a quiet story about two old widowed people falling in love, which admittedly doesn’t sound terribly...
by Donna | Jun 12, 2012 | Fiction, Merely Impassioned
Rating: Time to toss your copy of Zeitoun in your curbside recycling bin; it can land on top of Three Cups of Tea in the corner of the bin reserved for books that don’t even deserve donation to a library because they turned out to be dishonest accounts...