Book #92 of 2017: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness A powerful novel of grief and guilt, where a boy struggling to come to terms with his mother’s cancer must also face down the primeval creature that has crawled out of his dreams with harsh truths of its own. There’s a reading of this story …
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Book #91 of 2017: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Individual passages of this book are gorgeously written, but the plot of a group of hostages gradually becoming friends (and in one case, lovers) with the gun-wielding terrorists keeping them prisoner made me supremely uncomfortable. It would be one thing if the story were intended as …
Book #90 of 2017: The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick I mostly liked this story of an elderly widower who breaks out of the solitary routine he’s been in since his wife’s death, rediscovering his own love for life as he tries to learn more about her life before she met him. …
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Book #89 of 2017: White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius Gopez (White Sand #1) White Sand is an unpublished manuscript by author Brandon Sanderson, and this graphic novel is an adaptation of the first part of that unreleased novel, with two more planned volumes to follow. I had hoped that …
Book #88 of 2017: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond A dry but interesting account of world history through the lens of cultural materialism, an anthropological theory holding that differences in environment can explain much of the variation that exists across cultures. For historian Jared Diamond, this approach essentially …
Book #87 of 2017: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott Tipton and David Tipton Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time was a 12-issue comic book series written for the show’s 50th anniversary in 2013, telling the story of a mysterious enemy kidnapping the Doctor’s companions across all of the Time Lord’s incarnations thus far. It’s …
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Book #86 of 2017: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova The Historian is a fascinating book that manages to be both a haunting vampire story and an ode to the alternating joys and terrors of scholarly research. Dracula exists in this novel not only as a character, but also as a metaphor for any such beguiling …
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Book #85 of 2017: Ever by Gail Carson Levine I’ve liked Gail Carson Levine’s other works, but Ever was a bit of a misfire for me. The ancient Mesopotamian setting felt very surface-level, as though Levine had only a cursory understanding of the area and its culture when she decided to use it for her …
Book #84 of 2017: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn This thriller from Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn lives up to its title, spinning a dark story of a woman trying to piece together the night from her childhood when someone murdered her mother and sisters just outside her bedroom door. It’s a well-told mystery populated …
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Book #83 of 2017: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt A raw and unflinching look at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who organized the mass transportation of Jews into concentration camps and gas chambers. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish author who sat in on his …
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