- June 29, 2024
Twenty two year old Violet is fresh out of prison from a drunk driving accident that killed a local kindergarten teacher, alone in a city where she knows no one. Middle aged Harriet, who runs the book group in the women’s prison that housed Violet, is about to watch the last of her children leave ...
Read more… - June 21, 2024
Books on Tap is a book club for people who don’t want to be told what to read. We meet the third Thursday of the month at 6pm a rotating location of local breweries and pubs to talk about all things books. Below is a list of (almost) all the books we talked about.
The next ...
Read more… - June 5, 2024
Greta and Valdin Vladislavljevic (pronunciation guide included, and often) are Māori-Russian-Catalonian adult siblings who share in apartment in Auckland, New Zealand, not far from the rest of their family. As the book begins, they are not doing well. As the book continues, things only get worse.
Valdin, the host of a travel show who suffers from ...
Read more… - May 30, 2024
Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel is a delightful journey through the enchanting streets of Paris, tailor-made for food lovers and bookworms. The story revolves around the captivating Shakespeare and Company bookstore and a myriad of mouthwatering restaurants scattered across the city. Reichl’s writing is so vivid that you can practically taste the delicious food and ...
Read more… - May 23, 2024
A Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Oeger, Alder Keleman Saxena and FeiFei Zhou
Most likely you’ve noticed, but more than just the earth’s climate is changing. There is a tendency, in discussions about the epoch of human-induced environmental transmutation known as the Anthropocene, to emphasize the planetary: rising ...
Read more… - May 15, 2024
Lives of the Wives describes the lives of wives of five famous writers and how their husbands resented or stifled their artistic careers. Many of us know about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (not included in this book) or Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal (included) but in this book contains chapters on couples whose marital ...
Read more… - May 8, 2024
In The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story, Cara Robertson skillfully reconstructs the sensational murder trial with meticulous detail, drawing from court transcripts to humanize the events. She expertly weaves doubt into the narrative by exposing flaws in the police investigation and highlighting Lizzie Borden’s compromised state during questioning. Robertson’s accessible storytelling and balanced ...
Read more… - April 25, 2024
Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur
Although humans have been dying as long as we’ve been living on the earth, death continues to come as an unwelcome shock to most of us. There is, however, a growing contingent of mortals eager to shift the cultural stance ...
Read more… - April 18, 2024
As a sort of international sampler platter of contemporary women poets whose writings swerve into some of the stranger wilds where feminist politics meet surrealism, I submit:
All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda
Hackers by Aase Berg
Please note that none of the above are for the ...
Read more… - April 3, 2024
The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell was published in the early 1970s, a time of apocalyptic malaise and unmooring. He dedicated it to his two young children, Maud and Fergus, and the theme of death and rebirth is redolent throughout. This is arguably Kinnell’s best work, a poetic masterpiece, but one I read as ...
Read more…
