Category Archives: Book Reviews

In which the reader shares his thoughts on the books that possess his imagination throughout the year.

Book Reviews, Gothic/Horror, Mystery, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Young Adult

A Vacation Within the Pages

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Time, as it always does, has rushed on, and our annual May trip to the rolling hills and lush green valleys of eastern Missouri’s wine country has come and gone. It was a wonderful, restful vacation despite a few less than ideal circumstances. One of these being the fact that I got some kind of intestinal bug on Tuesday, the day we left, that brought with it a two-day fever and off-again, on-again stomach cramps that didn’t go away until Saturday morning. The other was a week-long rainy forecast.

Don’t feel bad for me though, we really did have a relaxing and refreshing time together. I didn’t get any pictures to share this time, just the mental ones I took of the beautiful green countryside that we drove through each day on our outings. We did a lot of exploring, and a lot of reading. I decided to let this post serve as an “I’ve returned” message followed by some mini-reviews of the books I managed to get through over the course of this past week.

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Book Reviews, Mystery

The Man in the Brown Suit ~Agatha Christie

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The Man in the Brown Suit ~Agatha Christie

–published 1924, audio version published 2005
–BBC Audiobooks America
–read by Emilia Fox
–4.25/5 stars

Anne Beddingfeld is a young woman who longs for the kind of adventures she sees when she goes to the theatre to view The Perils of Pauline. One afternoon in the tube station she sees a lone man fall to his death on the tracks after apparently being startled by some unseen menace behind her. When a suspicious doctor suddenly shows up on the scene and then quickly rushes off, Anne follows him and sees a piece of paper fall from his hand with an enigmatic code on it. Her senses come alive and she believes she has found her adventure, an idea further fueled by a murder allegedly committed by the unknown “man in the brown suit”, a man Anne believes is one and the same with her suspect physician. What follows is a charming whodunit with Wodehousian overtones that takes Anne Beddingfeld away from England, by boat, to the country of South Africa.

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Book Reviews, Nonfiction, Young Adult

More About Boy ~Roald Dahl

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More About Boy ~Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake

–published 2008 (25th anniversary edition of 1984 book)
–Farrar, Straus and Giroux
–240 pages
–4.5/5 stars

I wish I could say that I grew up reading Roald Dahl…and perhaps I can, but not in the traditional sense. While I did not meet any of Mr. Dahl’s wonderful characters as a child, I became acquainted with him while working in a bookstore in my early 20’s, and I’ve certainly ‘grown up’ some since then. But not so much that I have lost my childlike enthusiasm for good childrens stories, or for the authors who create such works of magic. Roald Dahl is one of those magicians, in his stories for children and his adult short stories.

I have wanted to read Boy since I first watched Meg Ryan read from it in the film, You’ve Got Mail. There are a couple of really enchanting moments that happen in her small bookstore in the film, and the reading of The Great Mouse Plot was one of them. The desire to include some nonfiction in my own personal Once Upon a Time IV quest made this the perfect time to pick up this delightful, and sometimes disturbing, book.

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Book Reviews, Short Stories

Dangerous Laughter ~Steven Millhauser

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Dangerous Laughter ~Steven Millhauser

–published 2008
–Alfred A. Knopf
–244 pages
–4/5 stars

With this volume of short stories, author Steven Millhauser proves that triskaidekaphobia is not in his vocabulary. Dangerous Laughter gathers together 13 examples of Millhauser’s unique voice into a collection that is wildly unpredictable. I recently read and reviewed Millhauser’s novella, Enchanted Night, which, while wholly satisfying, merely whet my appetite for more of his work. Though I would have said with all sincerity after reading his novella that Millhauser is now on my list of favorite writers, it helps to know that, for me at least, he is not a one-hit-wonder.

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Book Reviews, Young Adult

Slam ~Nick Hornby

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Slam ~Nick Hornby

–published 2007
–G.P. Putnam’s Sons
–309 pages

I ‘met’ Nick Hornby last year, and spent a considerably short amount of time delving into the his thoughts about books that he read (The Pollysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote For Money…click each title for review), and I read about half of his thoughts on soccer (Fever Pitch) but had not tried his fiction. My friend Jeff listened to this on audio awhile back and told me how entertaining, and horrifying, it was and when I ran across it in the library the other day I decided it was high time I gave it a try.

Jeff was dead on. It is entertaining. Highly entertaining. And if you are a parent, or plan to be a parent, it is horrifying. Very horrifying.

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