by Ernest Gaines
It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, [...]
I slammed the first Thursday Next book when I first read it for violating its own principles of first-person narration, and yet I can’t keep myself from reading all the others in the series as soon as they come out, because the idea of Literary Detectives and being able to jump into books is just [...]
by Diane Setterfield
A friend has been recommending this to me for months, and I finally found time to sit down with it. The main character, an amateur biographer, gets summoned by an eccentric novelist who wants her to write an official biography–throughout the years the novelist has given many imaginative versions of her own life, [...]
A perfect finish to an excellent series. I pretty much loved everything about it. No, I won’t say anything more than that in case there’s anybody lurking about who hasn’t read it yet, because I’m not into spoiling HP. At all. The only thing that keeps it from being a Superior is the epilogue, which [...]
A novel about the history of philosophy, according to the subtitle. Sophie, a fifteen-year-old Norwegian girl, starts receiving mysterious packages containing “a course in philosophy,” which moves from the Greek philosophers through Medieval Christian philosophy and the Enlightenment to modern times. The book itself ends up throwing in a bit of literary theory and postmodernism [...]
