Going, going, gone

Company’s coming, and I’m trying to clean up the stacks. Here are four, oddly assorted books I’m putting in my “going, going, gone” box. It’s time they called somewhere else home: Angel, city of, (Pocket Pulse), a paperback novelization of the series premiere by Nancy Holder: I remain an ardent Buffy/Angel/Joss Whedon fan, but my loyalty does not [...]

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Oh, Canada

NBC has been filling up empty airtime around the Olympics with stories on all things Canadian: Royal Mounties, beer, cuisine, fashion, wildlife, actors and so on. As far as I know — I haven’t been glued to the set — we’ve seen nothing yet on Canadian writers, and I think I know why. They’re very much part [...]

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Leap of Faith

Trust me. In spite of a terrible title that makes it sound like a tawdry bodice-ripper, Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin is a wonderful, layered novel of girls and women, friendship, loyalty and betrayal. Also, adolescent longing, spiritual yearning, thwarted dreams and long memories. No wonder Godwin couldn’t come up with a more appealing title, although I’m leaning toward “The Reckoning of [...]

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Top Spin

The Winter Olympics come along every four years, just like presidential elections. Both can be great spectator sports, although the Olympics have a higher tone of civility and a lot less mud-slinging, providing it quits raining in Vancouver. But you know what I mean. Bipartisanship has made Washington politics so downright ugly of late that even cable news [...]

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I Heart These Books

I didn’t make a year-end list of recommendations for 2009 because I was too busy trying to get this blog going. (And it was the holidays, too). But now several of my favorite books from last year are out in paperback. I see that that they are all mysteries of one kind or another, but each [...]

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Something magic

A modern-day Medusa with anger-control issues. A snarky vampire worried about his 800-year-old looks. Blades of grass growing like sharp knives in a suburban backyard. These were just three of the fantastic images generated by participants in a recent writing workshop on magical realism sponsored by MAD About Words and moderated by current Kerouac House [...]

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Bye, Bye Love

Valentine’s Day fast approaches, but not everyone will be celebrating. Unfortunately, love can be a battlefield, where Cupid’s arrows go awry and emotional IEDS detonate hopes and dreams. But all is not lost.  Happily, reports from the frontlines can be found in Love Is a Four-Letter-Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, which reassures us that we are [...]

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Thrill Ride

It’s Race Week in Daytona; Bike Week coming up next month. I mention this because motorcycles play a crucial role in Rescuing Olivia, a spiffy new thriller from Central Florida writer Julie Compton. First, someone steals Anders and Olivia’s helmets at a secluded springs in the Ocala National Forest. Then they’re the victims of a [...]

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Almost Still Life

Elizabeth Kostova begins her new novel The Swan Thieves with an arresting scene of an elderly artist in 1895 France, painting a woman in traveling clothes walking down a deserted village lane. The artist cannot see her face, but that is all right: “He needs her as she is, needs her moving away from him into the [...]

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Okra Picks

Yes, you read that right. SIBA — the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance — has announced its pick of the winter/spring 2010 crop of books. Go to www. sibaweb.com to see the list. Congrats to all the authors involved. Several of these books were already on my radar — Connie May Fowler’s How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, [...]

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