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Category Archives: What I’m Reading

Strangers Tend To Tell Me Things

I picked this book up because I love the author’s laugh.  Best known as advice columnist “Ask Amy,”  Amy Dickinson also moonlights on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, where her laugh is my favorite part of the show.  This book just proved what I’d already guessed by her laugh:  Amy is a really nice […]

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

I thought Sittenfeld’s An American Wife was completely amazing and have pushed it upon numerous friends.  It should go without saying to those who know me that Pride & Prejudice is one of my favorite books.  What a disappointment Eligible was.  It was neither a reboot with modern flair or a unique take on Austen’s […]

The Family Gene

The Family Gene:  A Mission To Turn My Deadly Inheritance Into A Hopeful Future by Joselin Linder. Joselin Linder’s father dies from something doctors cannot explain.  When the family starts connecting his death to other mysterious family deaths, they and curious doctors consider a genetic link.  Linder writes a book that is part memoir, part […]

When We Were On Fire

:A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over. Hm.  I hate trashing another beginning writer’s efforts.  In fact, I so admire Addie Zierman for taking the time and having the courage to put herself on the page.  She does some things very well:  she has an amazing memory, with a special talent for […]

The Story Hour

I loved Umrigar’s The Space Between Us.  It felt like she was deep in the heart of the characters, deep in my heart.  This one was surprising, therefore, for long spaces that I found flat and shallow.  I didn’t really feel deep inside the characters hearts, or that I could be.  Strange.  I felt sympathetic […]

Nine Parts of Desire

I’ve loved Geraldine Brooks novels:  they are so readable, muscular and tight and full of detail that doesn’t overwhelm a galloping plot.  Before she started writing novels, she was a reporter, a daring, adventurous, bad-ass foreign correspondent.  Nine Parts of Desire is her reporting from across parts of the Muslim world.  What is done to […]