Book #215 of 2019: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware Despite my hopes, Ruth Ware’s mystery thrillers keep not quite working for me. This one takes its obvious inspiration from The Turn of the Screw, adding to that classic framework of a governess beset by her unsettling charges and the possibility of ghosts …
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Book #214 of 2019: The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel This volume is part crash-course on traditional wisdom from Judaism and part demonstration of how it can inform modern child-raising. As with most parenting books — or self-help guides more generally — the advice can …
Book #213 of 2019: The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King Given a recent string of underwhelming titles, I decided to revisit this old favorite of mine. It was the first Stephen King book that I ever read, and it got me hooked on the author at a stage when I didn’t feel brave …
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Book #212 of 2019: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden This volume by infamous CIA/NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reminds me somewhat of James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty, and not just because I read both of them for my local book club. Each is also half memoir and half political tract, finding a controversial public figure recounting …
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Book #211 of 2019: Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #4) This final volume in The Rain Wild Chronicles embodies all of the problems of that fantasy quartet. It’s long and uneventful and curiously detached from its characters, none of whom seem to have much of an arc or any particular …
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Book #210 of 2019: Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal by Renia Spiegel with her sister Elizabeth Bellak I have mixed feelings about this diary of a Polish Jew who was killed by the Nazis at age 18. The obvious comparison point is fellow Holocaust victim Anne Frank, but Frank was a consummate observer who hoped …
Book #209 of 2019: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt This is an interesting topic, and I appreciate the array of studies that author Tom Vanderbilt has assembled for the task, but I find many of his arguments hard to parse, reliant on unjustified …
Book #208 of 2019: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson This is one of those popular history volumes that’s a deep dive into a fairly narrow topic, and I definitely learned a lot about the shipwreck incident that’s usually rendered as just a sentence or two in the account of …
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Book #207 of 2019: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2) This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between …
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Book #206 of 2019: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo This intergenerational drama reads fine on the surface, but so many elements ring false upon a moment’s reflection. Like the fact that the central family is repeatedly described as Catholic but never shown doing anything religious, or that the college professor complaining …
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