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‘Station Eleven’ By Emily St. John Mandel


A loan from a friend from my D&D group who thought I’d like and I did. Read more

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Ace Double: The Sun Smasher & Starhaven


Edmond Hamilton’s The Sun Smasher is a surprisingly slow paced (but not boring nor lacking in excitement) novel for something barely one hundred pages. A man on earth is told his life is a lie and he’s actually the brainwashed heir to an old empire. Swift, but not blunt hints are dropped that maybe that old empire wasn’t so great. An apocalyptic weapon too powerful to ever use. Oh, and giant psychic spiders. Read more

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Julian The Apostate


Of course, this article from LRB drew me because of Gore Vidal’s novel, Julian. And this review, while never mentioning the novel (an odd oversight, I thought, even if you are not a Gore fan), suggests that the novel’s history is t bad.

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The Cold Commands


He lost me. Seven hundred odd pages culminating in some poorly explained gobbledygook that reminded me of a lot of earlier gobbledygook, albeit less densely packed, that I had deigned to overlook. Read more

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Bret Easton Ellis In The LRB


Just going to briefly make a pitch in favor of reading James Walcott’s article on Bret Easton Ellis in the May 23 edition of the London Review of Books. Technically, it is a review of his latest book, White, but a nice and balanced and clear eyed appraisal of his career, recognition of the value and failure of books like American Psycho, and taking a nuanced look at his late career shift as a middle aged, conservative, would-be provocateur. It even made me less angered by his wrongheaded and shallow retorts to younger generations.

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China Rich Girlfriend


Some eighty-five percent of the way through this novel, I realized that it’s actually a nineteenth century novel (a touch more explicit about the sex, but arguably with slightly less sex overall than its predecessors). The coincidences, the interrelations, the series of deus ex machina (what’s the plural for that?). Arguably, this one was better than Crazy Rich Asians for embracing its origins (though lacking the newness of that first book). I just hope the movie finds away to make sure Michelle Yeoh gets plenty of screen time.

Now it’s time to ask for the library to hold a copy of the third book for me.

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The Curse Of Chalion


I can’t remember where this was recommended to me as an excellent fantasy novel by a female writer whose work is in danger of being overlooked these days, but it made enough of an impression that I bought this when I saw it at library book sale near my house. Unfortunately, Ms. Bujold will boy get royalties on the dollar I gave the Southeast library. Fortunately, I did get a good book. I devoured it as quickly as I could over the first few days that I had it. Read more

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‘Love’s Labours Lost’ Or, A Child’s First Shakespeare


The little one saw her first Shakespeare play last night: Love’s Labours Lost.

If you have ever read this blog before (and ninety percent of you who have are my mother), then you know how much I love the edifice and institution that is the Folger Shakespeare Library and how unsurprising it is that her first experience of live theater (we are not including Frozen on Ice) would be there.

It is not his finest play, but there is some of Shakespeare’s most elegant language and some of his most arch sex jokes. While the more than usually high language passed her by, she loved watching the performances and madcap antics (and costumes).

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The Fifth Risk


I’m done. I’m done reading the nonfiction of the Trump area. I never used to read ‘current events’ because the facts become dated so quickly and the analysis appears facile mere months later. I should return to that stance having read two Trump books this year. Read more

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The Last Of Our Ten Stops To Complete The DC Independent Bookstore Crawl: Kramerbooks